Renegade Animation has produced a new 30-second spot for Target and agency The Design Guys, Minneapolis to promote the store's Halloween items. Directed by Darrell Van Citters, He's Not a Freak, features an assortment of ghosts, ghouls, monsters and demons preparing for Halloween. A skeleton swallows a piece of candy (which drops straight through his rib cage) and a witch decorates her spooky mansion using the wrappings from a friendly mummy in place of crepe paper. The Design Guys based the commercial on characters created by Sarah Nelson of Werner Design Werks. The colorful and highly graphical style of the 2D characters allowed Renegade animators to create surprising transitions and other visual flourishes. "It's a style that we love to work in because it is very appealing," said Renegades executive producer Ashley Postlewaite, "It is a style that allows for some sophisticated techniques that adults appreciate." Renegade used Macromedia Flash software to execute portions of the project. In a hybrid technique the studio employed while producing cartoons for the Internet, animators drew the characters by traditional cel means and used Flash to edit them into sequences. "For us, Flash is more of an authoring tool than an animation tool," Postlewaite explained. "We use it to help speed up the animation process. We find we end up with much better animation by doing most of the creative work by conventional cel methods."
