Ever get the urge to jump into a river of salad dressing? Well, maybe you would if you were made of vegetables and lived in a vegetable cottage set in a vegetable landscape. This is the subject of ‘Dock,’ this year’s top nod in the Top Spots animation category.

‘Dock’ is the first of two spots in a Kraft Pourable Dressings campaign that aired throughout the summer. It was produced by The Animation House in Toronto.

The ad opens on a moving collage of photo-realistic vegetables and some chipper music (produced by The Einstein Bros.) that has a lot of ‘ooo, ooo’s’ and quiet dogs barking in place of percussion.

Eventually, the vegetables form a landscape complete with a cabin and dock. Then, a man, woman and dog appear on the dock just before a gigantic bottle of salad dressing unloads on the landscape, creating a river valley of sorts.

The man, clearly feeling like fresh celery (although apparently made of green beans), dives into the Ranchy ‘river’ with a creamy splash. Then the landscape explodes from below, creating a fabulous tossed salad. The bottle of dressing lands atop the salad and a sweet-voiced narrator closes the spot saying, ‘Kraft Dressings: Bite into summer.’

The :30 out of Leo Burnett was directed by Bob Fortier and Michael Crabtree at The Animation House. Crabtree also produced.

For the agency, Laura St. Amour produced, associate creative director Mark Fitzgerald wrote the spot and Clarke Smith art directed.

Handling photomation, an animation style employed in the ad, were The Animation House’s Jen Sherman, Pat Knight, and Vesna Mostovac.

Crabtree describes the process that went into the spot’s production. To begin with, the company prepared ‘mock illustrations just to get an idea of how the different vegetables would look.’

‘Then,’ says Crabtree, ‘we scanned already existing photos [of vegetables] and assembled a collage with those existing elements into something that resembled what we were after, just to see how the vegetables interacted with each other, because they’re all out of size relationship to each other.’

Satisfied with the results of the test, Crabtree ‘cast around for guys who could do the vegetable photography justice.’ The production settled on Michael Mahovolich Photography and also brought in food stylist Dennis Wood.

The photo shoot demanded a ‘certain amount of adaptation’ based on new ideas that arose – a vegetable that could stand in for a branch of a tree, for example.

The Animation House then drum-scanned the transparencies to allow for high-resolution (read: easily resizable) images.

‘Once they were scanned we had to go in and cut mattes for every single piece to get them off the background,’ Crabtree explains. After the mattes were cut, Crabtree turned his attention to ‘timing the elements so there’s a rhythm to how things come on and there’s a sequence of when they appear.’

Once the timing was ‘down,’ the large task of compositing began. ‘It’s a huge compositing job,’ Crabtree says. In the meantime, the cgi bottle pouring out the river was created.

To create the human and canine figures, the production employed stop-motion director Phillip Marcus, whose ‘area of expertise is visualizing claymation elements.’ The characters were created using more traditional linear animation and then the vegetable photomation was tracked over top.

The live-action product shot at the end of the spot was shot by Derek Case and produced by Nadine Gray through Generator Films.

The spot, which took about five weeks to create, aired nationally over the summer.

By all accounts, ‘Dock’ rated high with consumers and agency alike. Says Crabtree: ‘All the airing research that the agency did was incredibly positive as far as recognition goes. They actually put money from a different campaign into this – just because they were getting such great response on it.’ *