An animated cereal
The television ads for Kellogg’s Apple Jacks breakfast cereal provide an ongoing narrative in which two characters (Bad Apple and CinnaMon) are locked in a race to be the first to “hit the taste buds” of Apple Jacks fans – a race CinnaMon always wins.
London-based animation agency Loose Moose brought the storyboards to life, after a five-way fight to win the pitch from ad agency Leo Burnett in Chicago.
“We sent character designs and initial storyboard ideas, along with a budget,” says John Shearlock, a senior CG animator with Loose Moose. Loose Moose is the studio behind the highly successful Chips Ahoy! and Peperami ads, and was established by director and animator Ken Lidster and producer Glenn Holberton in 1994.
To date there are five animated Apple Jacks ads – Dream, Costume Parts 1 & 2, Showtime, and Time to Go. The conceptualization process began with Loose Moose receiving an agency board showing how it imagined the spot, and the key moments it felt it needed to be included.
“The director drew his interpretation of the script and agencies board, adding his creative style,” says Shearlock. “The storyboards then went back and forth between agency and director until both parties were happy.”
Costume drama
Each of the Apple Jacks instalments brought unique challenges for Loose Moose. In Costume (where Bad Apple makes a costume to impersonate CinnaMon) the finished spots are a composite of live action, stop-frame animation, and CGI.
Shearlock says: “A tricky shot in Costume was where the characters were running towards a camera that was tracking backwards. The idea was to provide a cartoony rolling background, so the shot had no real background buildings.
“The shot had to be tracked and then stylized once brought into Maya, by tweaking the camera path and deforming the entire background set using freeform deformers. This can be exceedingly processor-expensive.”
For the Dream ad, Loose Moose built the sets. The kitchen was constructed at twice real-life scale. Director Ken Lidster decided on this to solve size fluctuations between the characters and backgrounds that appeared in previous spots, because it was decided this would have been confusing in Dream.
Shearlock explains: “In previous ads we shrunk the model animated characters to fit into the “real” kitchens, but because this ad was shot entirely in the kitchen we had to decide either to shrink and comp every shot, or build a big kitchen.”
Model home
The animation and live action was shot on 35mm, with the film scanned, digitized, then edited in Adobe After Effects. “The kitchen shot in Dream was tricky, and to tackle it we used Maya Live to obtain tracking points of key features such as corners and cupboard handles,” says Shearlock.
“This allowed us to create a simple polygonal object, by snapping vertices to them. We then selected a frame of the camera move that would reveal the majority of the empty kitchen and painted up a detailed matte image that was projected onto the polygon.
“Finally, we took the new fully moving kitchen extension into After Effects for colour correction and general tarting up.”
Another tricky sequence in Dream was achieving the effect of Bad Apple bursting through a milky dreamworld. “A simple sculpt deformer was used, and then the drops of milk were created using simple blobby particles,” says Shearlock.
“A combination of model Apple Jacks and CG ones were used for Bad Apple to interact with. Creating CG Apple Jacks to match the model ones was texturally very difficult, and achieved using mostly procedural textures.
It required the addition of pockmarks to the geometry, and therefore some geometry-heavy modelling. “Pre-visualization was done in the computer using a CG stand-in for Bad Apple. The camera was then matched on the shoot and the two end results – the stop-frame animation of Bad Apple and the CG Milky dreamworld – tallied perfectly.”
One of the most complicated scenes in Show Time involved CinnaMon falling into a subway, via a wormhole placed by the crafty Bad Apple, and then surfing through a tunnel on top of a subway train.
“The train was real, but the snaking subway tunnel was all CG,” says Shearlock. “The animation of the train had to be matched to a pre-visualization of how the shot should feel in CG.” This involved matching the lens and ground plates between the CG and the real camera, and then dropping the CG pass into a video-assist monitor that the animators used for feedback, says Shearlock.
“It’s very difficult matching snaking animation of this nature, so the motion of the camera in the CG tunnel had to be tweaked and the CG pass re-entered.” Loose Moose has been using Maya for five years, and Shearlock says it offers flexibility, as well as the chance to get in and tweak things if necessary.
“It’s an extensive set of tools for problem solving,” he says. “I feel comfortable that Maya will provide a solution to any creative problem. We have also looked at various tracking software and found Boujou to be the best.”
Tutorial by Sean Ashcroft, DIGIT magazine © IDG 2006
- star1
- Please log in to rate
In the Costume ad, the two Apple Jacks characters run towards the camera while the camera tracks backwards. The tricky tracking task was stylized in Maya.
Project: Kellogg’s Apple Jacks
Ad agency: Leo Burnett Chicago, www.leoburnett.com
Animation agency: Loose Moose, www.loosemoose.net
Art director: Craig Barnard
Senior CG animator: John Shearlock
CG animator: Dave Loh
Post production: Bruce Hancock, Edgeworx UK, www.edgeworx.com
All images copyright 2005 Kellogg NA Co.