Sterrett Dymond Stewart Advertising in Charlotte, North Carolina chose Buzzco Associates, Inc. to create a :30 spot for AnMed Health Care state-of-the-art heart health care facility. The spot needed to be a springboard from the print and billboard ads featuring a man carrying a big heart balanced precariously over giant lettering saying "Don't Trust Your Heart to Anyone Else." Co-creative director Lee Stewart said he knew that Candy Kugel and Vincent Caferelli were the folks to translate illustrator Paul Zwolak's painterly design into animation.
"They wanted a bright white background, with sharp black type, a painterly character carrying a big red heart panning across the TV screen to match the print," said Kugel. "Unfortunately, video doesn't like high contrast verticals panning across the screen, thin horizontals or highly saturated reds that tend to bleed, especially over white.
"I made several models to soften the background, bevel the type's edges and added a soft drop shadow that not only solved those problems, but also added to the three-dimensionality." She continued. "As for the painterly feeling, we used a combination of Photoshop and Painter to achieve a handmade look."
The man was hand-drawn and animated by Cafarelli. "This was the perfect project to integrate our traditional animation know-how with the benefits of computer 2D programs like Painter and AfterEfects. Painter was able to replicate how we would have hand-painted cels with brush strokes and overpainting. Although it was painstakingly slower to color in Painter than just paint-bucket-ing enclosed areas, which is so easily done in paint programs."
The moving lettering was a combination of hand-drawn (Cafarelli liked the letters squashed and stretched) that Kugel was able to match in AffterEffects. "In the old days we would have had to hand letter the titles, a very expensive, painful and time-consuming alternative."
Kugel said she was happy to use a computer for the more than five-foot long pan. It would have been a real task to shoot it traditionally on the animation stand and impossible to pick up any mistakes, according to Kugel. "We could never have achieved that 20:1 zoom at the end, so seamlessly achieved digitally."
Russ Dymond was co-creative director on the spot. Marilyn Kraemer produced it for Buzzco. Rick Broas assisted and did the rendering.
