Less than a year old, Guru Animation Studio recently completed its first campaign, a series of six Hershey’s Kisses ads for Ogilvy, Mexico. For the crew at Guru, scoring the Hershey’s assignment was a bit of a coup.

Anne Deslauriers, executive producer at the shop, explains what makes the job so special. ‘The unusual thing about this campaign is that Hershey’s has done a lot of commercials but they’ve always used the same production house in the States to do them.’

‘Basically they were looking for me to direct the spots,’ says Frank Falcone, Guru’s creative director. ‘This was a recommendation by the agency to the client to go with a different director. And when they found out we were starting up a company, they came to us and pretty much awarded it – provided our price was right – and we got the action.’

In the interest of background, Deslauriers explains the formation of Guru. ‘Frank and I had worked together about three or four years ago at TOPIX[/Mad Dog]. We had worked on award-winning commercials and enjoyed working with each other. I’d been working with Chuck [Gammage] for the last year or so through TOPIX. And we saw this opportunity for the three of us to start a company that is really devoted to character animation.’

Deslauriers goes on to explain that their connection to Gammage ‘is a financial relationship but also a creative relationship. As business partners, Frank and I could have gone to other financial sources. We chose Chuck because of his creative powers.’

The three appear well on their way to success with the Hershey’s job, which was completed over a six-month, staggered production schedule that began last July. ‘I delivered two spots at a time,’ Falcone explains.

The first of the six ads went to air in Mexico at Christmas, while the final spots were set to begin airing at the end of February. All the spots were created and rendered in Maya and composited in Combustion, an NT compositing package.

Falcone directed all six spots, while Mark Ainslie, Jason Carswell, Jamie McCarter and Sean Sullivan did animation. Robert Zhao built the CG model. Compositing was done in-house by Carmen Ngai and Optix hosted the final online and output to DBeta.

Working with the Mexican client proved a bit of a challenge for Falcone, who found some of the culturally specific content confusing. In particular, he notes a spot where an ‘almond flower’ is thrown from a window.

‘Throwing the almond flower to us was a bit of a bizarre idea,’ Falcone begins. ‘And making the mental jump to a flower was confusing to everyone. We were trying to give them a solution that was not as confusing, because to us it was confusing. I spoke to the creative director and he explained to me that in Mexico, when you serenade someone you either get thrown a flower because you’ve done a good job or they’ll dump a bucket of water on you. It’s so understood there that there is no question that this is a flower she’s throwing – even though we’re trying to sell the idea of an almond as part of a Hershey’s Kiss,’ he says.

Falcone was also challenged by the need to stay as true ‘to the original stop-motion spots as possible. Which means not only the look and feel but also the type of motion.

‘They should feel a little more like a stop-motion spot and a little less like a smooth-flowing CG spot. I think the tendency is when you put something in the computer you immediately want to smooth everything out and make all the motions really beautiful, because computers can do that really well,’ says Falcone.

‘But there is definitely a feeling you get from the old stop-motion spots. And that’s because of the technique they had to employ. We didn’t forget that and we made sure that we limited the amount of movement of the characters. So when there was a place where we could just hold an idea and a pose and a thought, we would. Because that’s what a stop-motion guy would do. They wouldn’t want to build a million shapes.’

Guru also worked to ‘degrade the imagery’ at the rendering stage of the project to ‘give it a more filmic, softer look – a grainier look.

‘If you don’t do that, then you have super-crisp imagery. And it’s not so bad if you’re doing a new project that no one has ever seen. But if you are doing something that has a history, people are going to note the difference. And they’re not going to necessarily like it looking cleaner and nicer and modern and computer-generated,’ Falcone explains.

The Mexican job is already paying dividends for the company. Apparently, Ogilvy, New York, was also doing a Hershey’s campaign at the time and ‘was curious as to who we were and how come we were doing this campaign of spots. So we got the opportunity to send our reel to Ogilvy in New York, which is really good for us,’ says Deslauriers.

Currently, Guru is working on an MOW with GVFX and a Quaker spot out of New York. The only Canadian commercial job in the house is for General Mills’ Nesquik through Cossette in Toronto. ‘It’s the first project we’re doing in relationship with Chuck Gammage Animation,’ Deslauriers announces. *