For the third consecutive year, Toronto’s Spin Productions has come out on top in the Top Spots F/X and animation category. Spin designer Hiep Pham gets the nod for his work on The Bay’s Fashion Cares spot. The spot, entitled ‘Fun With Fashion,’ features the after-work exploits of some tough-looking, blue-collar guys getting ready for a fashionable – and feminine – night on the town.

In the ad, the central character runs through a Bay store on a shopping spree, grabbing and putting on all the women’s accoutrements one might need for a glamorous evening. A heavy dose of graphics is integrated with the live-action footage – the action often freezes with the hero becoming an illustration in a retro ’70s style. Fun and campy graphics are also used to key the spot’s many transitions.

Pham collaborated closely with the spot’s director and editor, Brad Walsh from The Players Film Company and Chris Van Dyke from Relish, respectively, to achieve all this eye candy.

‘I started on the type, graphic borders and some illustrations ahead of time, but we had to otherwise wait until the edit was completely locked down,’ Pham explains. ‘Then Chris would send us the transition point between the two shots, and I would do the two drawings and animate.’

Pham had to be on top of his prep work, since he had only two days to do all the illustrations.

‘At the same time, the inferno system was putting the type in place, cueing it with music and doing transitions other than illustrations,’ Pham says. ‘[Spin inferno artist] Kristi-Ann Webster did everything she could while I was drawing and animating the fully illustrated transitions.’

Pham and the production team flirted with the idea of using still images for the ad instead of animation, mostly to save time. Soon into the process, however, Pham discovered there was in fact sufficient time to do a first-class job animating the elements before sending them over to Webster for additional work.

‘The first day was spent trying to get a good drawing down and keeping everything stylistically tight,’ says Pham. ‘Once I got that going and everybody was happy with it, the next step was animating it, which was done pretty much simultaneously. As soon as I was finished illustrating, I would go right into the animation.’

Working on his Mac G4, Pham illustrated the work in Adobe Photoshop and animated in After Effects.

‘I could have done it with an illustrator, but I was more comfortable with Photoshop,’ says Pham. ‘The only drawback was I couldn’t scale it very big before [the image] got fuzzy.’

He says the biggest challenge he had to face with the spot was nailing down the right look for his illustrations, but says the client, agency and director all seemed open to his ideas, which brought a very stylized element into the mix.

‘They were all open to more colors and so forth,’ says Pham. ‘Obviously we couldn’t do illustrations that were exactly the same as [the live-action footage], so I wanted to get down a style quickly and play off it and bring it further.’

-www.spinpro.com