Charlex recently completed an animated :30 spot for those ever-popular M&Ms, helping coordinate them into kaleidoscopic patterns set to Iron and Wine's "Such Great Heights."
The spot opens as the camera moves up through a dazzling kaleidoscopic world of M&Ms. As we move up through regular M&Ms and animated M&M characters, we reach what seems to be the end of the kaleidoscope, explained producer Christine Vallee. Suddenly, two fingers and a haze of light break through the wall of M&Ms. We see the face of a young man and the camera continues to move up, looking down upon him, as he relishes the candy. We see that he is sitting in a park and the park, itself, is animated in a live-action Busby Berkeley sequence that resembles a kaleidoscope.
Added CG/SFX supervisor Keith McCabe: M&M's KALEIDOSCOPE was an interesting project that presented many creative and technical challenges. Our task was to create a Kaleidoscope made of M&Ms candies and characters that we could travel through in 3D space. Typical Kaleidoscopes are two-dimensional. Simply put, you take an image and mirror it a number of times in a specific pattern. Our Kaleidoscope actually needed to be made up of individually animated M&M's arranged in specific patterns in 3D space so that we could fly a camera through them. Also, we needed to be able to incorporate the animated M&M's characters within our kaleidoscopic world. Our crew was made up of about 10 artists, led by animation director Tony Tabtong and lighting director James Fisher. The spot was completed in around four weeks, using Maya and mental ray."
Added Tabtong, "Animating something traditionally based on 2D rules always presents its own inherent challenges. In this case, our M&Ms had to live in true 3D space, yet still create the illusion of a kaleidoscope. We had a lot of freedom to play with the scale relationships in order to achieve interesting compositions with the lentils and the characters while keeping the branding strong.
The agency [BBDO, New York] knew the characters extremely well and helped a lot keeping us true to the personalities. As with many spots, the trick is getting the point across in the least amount of frames budgeted, since we had a lot to do in 30 seconds. We found the best way was to hit a pose, an easily recognizable and popular pose, and that would be enough, and all frames leading up to and after it worked only to serve the purpose of the 'golden standard' pose.
Other Charlex credits include:
* Exec Creative Director: Alex Weil* Senior Producer/VFX Supervisor: Steve Chiarello* Smoke Artists: Kevin Matuszewski, Christopher Palazini and Rob Aiello* Flame Artists: Greg Oyen, Marc Goldfine, Jesse Newman, Burtis Scott and Kevin Quinlan* Designer: Chisa Yagi* Lead Animator: Pat Porter* Lighting Technical Director: Szymon Weglarski* Lead Character Technical Director: Steve Mann
New York-based Charlex (www.charlex.com) is a full service digital design and visual effects studio for film and television.
Bill Desowitz, former editor of VFXWorld, is currently the Crafts Editor of IndieWire.
