In a discussion with Jolly Roger director Steve Chase and art director Alan Fellows about how they created the look for the Molson Canadian ‘Teaser’ spot, this year’s craft award winner for art direction, the word ‘evolution’ keeps coming up.

Perhaps it’s a subconscious reference to the very big idea of primates defining what it is to be human against the backdrop of a house of religion. Then again, it could be they are just emphasizing that creating the spot was an evolutionary process of adding elements to create an overall look and feel.

‘Teaser’ was singled out for its dramatic look, courtesy Chase and Fellows (and a cast of thousands) who created the spot’s gothic-industrial look and spared no effort on the details which provide a backdrop for those miles of monkeys set to the task of cracking the code of Canadianness.

The spot utilized an infinite number of painstakingly shot live-action elements of one set of four chimps pounding away at stylized keyboards to create the industrial vision of a sea of primates, while maintaining the personality of each writer, individually portrayed in his grand mission to define all that is Canadian.

Motion control from Command Post/toybox was used on the shoot and the complete look was brought together with the help of Axyz and toybox colorist Gary Chuntz.

The first challenge was addressing the idea of infinity and the visual representation thereof. The space chosen for the shoot had to reflect the infinite, says Chase, yet still maintain a sense of geography.

The director opted for a gothic cathedral look for the space to lend gravity to the toil undertaken by the chimps while also establishing a turn-of-the-century, industrial flavor for the spot.

When the perfect location – a Montreal church – was found, it formed the basis for the other visual components.

‘One piece led to the next,’ says Chase. ‘We looked at warehouses and big halls, etc. When I found the cathedral in Montreal it helped me to design, with Alan, the look of the rest of it – like the desks and typewriters. The look was evolutionary.’

Adds Fellows: ‘We were looking for a piece of architecture, not a church. But when we found this space, it was perfect; it lent itself to going on forever.’

Chase pored over books of gothic architecture and found a number of photographs of Italian cathedrals tinted in different colors. One of the photos featured a cool palette, which inspired the overall look of the commercial.

‘Once we decided it was going to be in the industrial vein, the palette started falling into place,’ says Chase. ‘It was going to be grays and metals and ’30s, ’40s and ’50s deco stuff.’

Fellows cites the ‘Long Weekend’ installment of the Molson campaign as a favorite and says it provided a testing ground for the visual elements used in the cathedral-based creative.

In ‘Long Weekend,’ the camera pans around a now-empty cathedral, abandoned by all but a couple of drone chimps due to long weekend activities. Fellows says the visual details had to be rich and compelling enough to stand up to an extended look at the cathedral interior sans all the distracting chimp activity.

The art director drew on his formative years in Nottingham, Eng. for certain elements of the spot, including the desks used by the typing primates, inspired by the wood-topped cast iron examples of Fellows’ youth.

The original plan was to create, via Vacu-form, 700 of the desks, but in the end only two sets of four desks were built.

The look of the spot was designed with a functional, utilitarian theme in mind, reflecting the industrial 1984-ish pall which colors the commercial.

‘Everything was functional,’ says Fellows. ‘There was a limited palette, with the old bronze and cast iron and industrial green look; it was like a factory for writing.’

In executing that overall look, Fellows says some design elements created to address functional necessities of the shoot, in the end added another level of aesthetic charm to the spot. For instance, the ornate cast iron pieces which are placed between each desk resulted from the inescapable facts of life when working with chimps: unless there were clearly defined seating areas for each, there would be too much, um, monkeying around among the scribes.

‘That’s what spurred the creation of those little separators,’ says Fellows. ‘And if you look at the `Long Weekend’ spot, as the camera pans down they add a whole other element to it. The whole thing evolved like that.’

Fellows points to another example: it was originally intended that the paper churned out by the chimps would be regular-sized fax paper, however, for any shots panning down the desks, that would have resulted in too much white space in the frame. Hence, Chase suggested a small alteration – paper that was six inches wide instead of the standard 8.5. The result is a small visual curiosity that adds to the Brazil-ian look of the spot.

‘It’s just something that’s a bit odd,’ says Fellows. ‘It’s a bit civil service, it’s standard to them but it doesn’t quite fit the rest of the world.’

The typewriters were also designed to fit into the industrial feel of the spot (‘I didn’t think it would be as interesting if the little guys were sitting there typing on lap tops,’ says Chase).

The team located the perfect archaic typewriter and applied gears, ‘so it was sort of like they were all connected to some big master plan,’ says Chase, and escaping steam was added to top it all off. Fellows says the effect was inspired by a radiator in the Jolly Roger offices which began hissing steam behind Chase’s head during a meeting.

All of the chimp footage was shot using motion control in order to match the numerous green-screen elements – there were as many as 300 separate pieces in some of the wide, moving camera shots, says Chase.

An additional challenge came with shooting the rest of the campaign and creating, after being steeped in the look of the original teaser, a number of wildly differing stories, each with its own visual style. ‘It was a huge project,’ says Chase. ‘But it was fun.’