Cuppa Coffee Animation recently completed two very different spots for Cartoon Network to promote two of the network's most popular shows. The studio created a 60-second promo for SAMURAI JACK, which combines eerie imagery with a predominantly red palette and an ominous soundtrack. Cuppa Coffee explained that it was an opportunity to do something a little more edgy and frightening than usual for the Cartoon Network airwaves. "Jack is one of the most original shows on the air," said Hector Herrera, creative director at Cuppa Coffee. "Its one of the few shows that can pull off long segments without dialogue, where viewers focus on the action and the stunning visuals. A big part of that action is the battle between good and evil, and in this spot we took a serious look at the evil part." The narrator begins with the question, "What is evil?" and a series of horrifying faces dissolve in and out of a cloud of blood-red smoke, morphing into each other accompanied by a sinister soundtrack. The spot is a continuous pull back during which various images of evil emerge. As the camera zooms out of his eye into a wide shot of his shape-shifting body, it is revealed that the images existed inside the mind of SAMURAI JACKS nemesis Aku. To create the "evil imagery," which changes from criminal mugshots to swords to monsters, stills of models and actors were taken with a high-resolution digital camera and brought into Photoshop for treatment. Original animation was scanned, inked and painted in Animo, and all post effects and transitions were completed in Adobe After Effects. For the second spot, Cuppa Coffee took a decidedly more lighthearted approach as they created a haunted gallery for SCOOBY UNIVERSE, a celebration of Scooby Doo throughout the ages. The campaign, created using cel and stop-motion animation, offered the Cuppa crew an opportunity to showcase the many different faces of Scooby Doo - his design changes, his family and all the other "Doo" relatives. Cuppa came up with the idea of creating a photo gallery in a haunted house to celebrate Scooby throughout the years. The crew created a haunted house in a format they call 2-and-a-half D. The process involves cutting sheets of foam core and Bristol board to construct a paper frame. The process offers a sense of depth and relief without building an entire prop, thereby using flat elements to create three dimensions. The set was shot with a Nikon D1X hi-resolution stills camera. Shooting this way gave Cuppa the option of shooting at film resolution, but outputting the same day and going immediately into post.
