Broadcast design and animation company Humunculus produced two colorful musical broadcast spots promoting Nickelodeon and Paramount Pictures' RUGRATS GO WILD. The two :60s are titled SPIKE SPEAKS! and TOGETHER! The first debuted May 15 and the second premiered on May 26.
Based on their successful collaboration on another recent project (two SURVIVOR ISLAND promo spots for the same movie), Nickelodeon's creative team of exec producer, creative director Eric Alan and producer Jody Lenke invited Humunculus to bid on the two-spot package. According to company founder Saam Gabbay, while all the other design and production companies in the bid had a week, his team had a weekend. Nonetheless, Humunculus won the job, and began work right away on the package (inspired by BYE BYE BIRDIE).
The package features hyper-real environments where kids were choreographed to original numbers composed and produced by Bob Hest of Hest & Kramer. Humunculus' creative director, Brumby Boylston, collaborated with Alan to develop the script, site gags and scene-specific transitions.
Over the past several years, Boylston has developed a signature animation technique, and as Gabbay explained, "The creative approach we suggested was conceived with After Effects 3D in mind." Together, Alan and Humunculus settled on a look that's a mix of live-action, miniatures and hand-painted backgrounds to create "a uniquely modernized 1950s experience."
The team shot green screen footage of the child actors on Super 35mm film at Hollywood National Studios. Backplates and miniatures were hand- painted and constructed by Brian Won and shot using a digital tabletop setup at Humunculus.
"For shooting our backplates and miniatures, we actually converted the company's main conference room into a miniatures production area," Won said. "Humunculus is comfortably set up to do this sort of project."
Gabbay had been looking for a way to build a self-contained online system and did so by adding a 900 GB ATA RAID array inside a dual 1.25 GB G4 using Apple's internal ATA interface. New Media Hollywood's Christopher Speer helped configure the system around the Blackmagic Design DeckLink uncompressed video card.
"This process required moving the boot drive to the second optical bay and connecting it to a Sonnet ATA card," Gabbay explained. "That freed up the remaining four bays, which we stuffed with four 200 GB IBM drives. Booting off the Sonnet card in OSX, we stripped the four-drive array with a simple drag and drop using Apple's Disk Utility. It took about 15 minutes for the whole install."
The solution helped Humunculus' senior editor, Arash Ayrom, load each and every frame of the production's footage into Final Cut Pro in uncompressed format - and still have room to spare, at a fraction of SCSI RAID prices.
Boylston's treatment required some overlapping scene elements so the final edit was done in After Effects as part of the integrated production technique. With the live-action, miniatures, painted scenics and other elements loaded in, 3D and compositing artist Arya Senboutaraj and Boylston completed the composites in After Effects 3D at 24 fps. 3:2 pulldown was re-introduced in the final render and a DVD of sequential files was delivered to Trailer Park, where movie footage was cut into the spots.
Nickelodeon's Alan also wrote and co-directed the spots and Leslie Lapage was Nick's production manager.
For Humunculus, Brumby Boylston served as writer, creative director and designer; Morgan Susser was the director of photography; Senboutaraj handled 3D and compositing along with exec producer Gabbay (who also handled keying and shot stabilizing). Brian Won did scenic painting, built miniatures and backplates, and Ayrom handled offline editing. Rebecca Morley produced the live-action and Dina Chang served as post producer.
Humunculus provides audiovisual content for television networks, ad agencies, entertainment companies and major corporations. For more information, visit www.Humunculus.com or call 310-822-8668.
Bill Desowitz, former editor of VFXWorld, is currently the Crafts Editor of IndieWire.
