Bozfilm animators David Bowes and Lisa Jane Gray are confident that their new spot for financial lending institution Aaron Acceptance looks pretty cool.

‘The best way I can explain itŠtake a 3D house, spray paint it all white, trace all the positive lines, like the outsides of the windows, with black,’ explains Bowes. ‘Now it looks like a drawing, but when we light it and push all the shadows forward you get the 3D look.’

While the labor-intensive spot would normally cost from $70,000 to $100,000, it is being done for significantly less as the ambitious animators welcomed the opportunity to try a new technique and push some limits.

The spot features a couple standing outside their suburban home next to which a garage is being built from the ground up. A driveway rolls out, the garage door opens and the family drives out in a van pulling a boat. As the family pulls away the house folds in and then builds itself back up ­ as a telephone.

The idea behind the spot, which combines traditional animation with stop motion, came from a friend of Gray’s in Holland whose reel contains a line drawing cutout of a Russian dancer stuck on a quarter-inch foam core.

‘I thought it was a really neat idea, so we took it one step further,’ says Gray. ‘The set is 3D foam core with black lines around the parameters to make it look kind of like a drawing but 3D.’

In order to create the effect of the garage forming, Bowes hand-crafted 12 replacement in-betweens which were shot frame by frame.

Besides the garage, framing, windows and trusses and the actual skeleton of a real garage, Bowes also hand-crafted a 3D boat and car.

Remaining with the hands-on theme of the entire project, the camera being used was custom-built in New Zealand and it is the only one of its kind in this country.

Also rather foreign to this part of the world is the Superline Tester software program, also from New Zealand, which together with the Commodore Amiga, the computer system being used for the shoot, makes things a lot easier when it comes down to the edit.

‘We use a video mixer so we can store a frame and then see the frame that we are working on and mix in between, sort of like flipping paper,’ says Gray. ‘We can play back any animation and edit.’

The animators spent two weeks pre animating bringing the shoot time down to two days, three if something g’es wrong.

‘It seems like every time we do a project it is completely different than the last one and it is really nice to be able to challenge ourselves, because with animation it’s unlimited,’ says Gray.

Audio is by Vancouver’s Koko Productions, with Northwest Imaging and Effects handling post.