After spending summer evenings on the patio furiously swatting and inflicting not very nice names on swarms of uninvited pests, it’s obvious that flies are attracted to light. But Ikea lamps?

Well, that’s the concept behind an Ikea spot created by the Toronto-based Roche Macauley & Partners team of creative director Geoffrey Roche, art director Deborah Prenger and producer Brenda Surminsky for air on German television.

Cue two houseflies, not your average insects, but two pretentious bugs with discriminating tastes when it comes to home decor, light fixtures and lamps in particular. The cgi-animated flies are tiny specks, yet look very real amidst a live-action set ­ an art-deco home filled with the bright colors and geometrical shapes of Ikea furniture and accessories.

Occasionally the camera closes in on these creme-de-la-creme of the bug world, revealing the realistic details and texture of their blue and green bodies and shiny wings.

They buzz from a trendy reading lamp to an ultra-modern hanging kitchen light fixture to a classic lampshade, commenting in snobbish fashion on their preferences for the fine lines and high-class design of Ikea lumiere and boasting of their elitist knowledge of the art of interior design.

Creating the animated flies held some artistic challenges for Spin Productions animator Kyran Kelly, creative director Rob Jones and producer Mark Andre Bourgoin.

‘The storyboards play it straight in their approach to humor. The flies aren’t wacky characters and that is the charm of the spot,’ says Kelly. ‘I wanted to give the flies some character, but I didn’t want them to be over-the-top and too cartoon-like.

‘I wanted them to be believable and appear real. But at the same time there are a couple shots where the flies come up close and we didn’t want them to be so real that viewers would think they were hairy, ugly things.’

Kelly customized a model of a fly and worked with Prisms software to create the leg and wing motions and character gestures of the computer-animated insects.

‘We painted texture maps from Adobe Photoshop and applied them to the model to give the body a certain amount of texture without making them too fly-like and grotesque,’ he explains.

Kelly also painted one fly in blue and another in vivid green to give them a unique look and personality.

Marrying the computer-animated flies to the live-action scene, shot and directed by Charles Wittenmeier for Imported Artists, was technically demanding.

‘In Prisms, I did motion-tracking of the shadows that fall on the furniture from the computer-generated flies so it didn’t look like the bugs were pasted in on top,’ says Kelly.

The live-action camera shots created a natural motion blur so it was crucial that the cg motion blur of the flies’ wings matched tightly.

‘Prisms has a good renderer so the motion blur looked good,’ he says. ‘It really married the look so it wasn’t too crisp and didn’t create the clean lines that would make it look cg.’

Kelly also created a virtual set on computer ­ a kitchen based on the floor plan and props that made up the live-action scene. He took notes during the live shoot and jotted down the lighting attributes of the scene so he could recreate it as accurately as possible in his computer-generated set.

‘The virtual set was helpful because I could see and plan where the flies were going rather than just guessing in a 2D fashion,’ he says. ‘I tracked this virtual set with the live action so I could decide how far in space the fly should move and I could pick up the lighting from the room.

‘With all the camera moves, it was a real challenge to ensure that the flight of the insects wasn’t fighting with the camera movement,’ Kelly continues. ‘I had to be fairly exacting.’

In post, Panic & Bob’s Dave Hicks added more grain-like effects to complete the cgi/live-shot scenery match.

The spot ends with a moment of p’etic justice. One of the snobbish little bugs decides to lecture on the fine quality and workmanship of the lampshade’s interior. But alas, even high-class flies can’t resist the allure of a simple light bulb. The upper-crust gent gets a bit too excited over its shiny 60-watt brilliance, moves a little too close to the object of his desire, and is quite inelegantly zapped, landing stomach-up with a groan on the floor.

All that time, money and effort wasted waving bug spray, sticking up flypaper and brandishing swatters, when an Ikea lamp might get rid of those pesky creatures once and for all.