Hazel Friedman
They may have named themselves after another planet, but the creative team at Jupiter Drawing Room, one of South Africa’s leading advertising agencies, are still way ahead on this galaxy, if their new cinema commercial for radio 5fm is any indication. Using an all-South African creative collaboration comprising artist Norman Catherine, freelance illustrator Allan Cameron and a whiz team at The Worx, a multimedia company, Jupiter has created a world first in 3D animation techniques.
Screened at a time when Amps figures confirm that more South Africans — particularly the youth — are tuning into radio than ever before, the 5fm commercial constitutes an energetic effort to recapture listeners who are turned on to hip, new, youth-oriented community stations such as Kaya and Yfm for aural arousal. The applause that has been erupting spontaneously in cinemas where the commercial has been screened must therefore be music to 5fm’s ears.
Resembling a music video, the animated commercial took almost two months to complete. It begins with a teenage boy downloading pornography off the Internet in his bedroom. In his zeal to plug another device into his already overloaded adaptor, he trips the lights and blows his father’s fuse in the process. A typical “close” encounter between father and son ensues with the latter motor-mouthing on about the former’s failures. But the words fly, literally, over his son’s head before forming a verbal whirlwind into which the father is sucked and ignominiously deposited in a bin marked “toxic waste”. The boy kicks back, puts on his headphones and smiles as the payoff line appears onscreen: “Only what you want to hear. 5fm Music radio.”
Cute, you’ll agree, and eminently suited to 5fm’s planned makeover — a new look, format and programme line-up — in anticipation of the new millennium. But what makes the commercial transcend the cool and trendy into the realms of gosh, gee and wow are Catherine’s snap-crackle- ‘n’-pop art and the innovative 3D animation techniques.
Renowned for his technicolour anthropomorphic (or animalistic, depending in which cheek your tongue is lodged) futuristic-primitive creatures, Catherine combines a wayward sense of humour with a fascination for the darker and often demonic sides of life. His gyrating human beasties, with their gaping mouths and contorted limbs, seem to occupy an extraterrestrial realm somewhere between Alice on Acid in Angstland and an Afro- Caribbean voodoo store.
But in the 5fm commercial, Catherine has opted for an off-the-wall (the Pink Floyd reference is not incidental), Nineties, post-modern psychedelia with smatterings of The Simpsons and Beavis and Butt-head. And his vibrant, richly textured, detailed imagery is enlivened through the assistance of long-time buddy Cameron, who designed a technique that would animate Catherine’s style most effectively, helped develop the storyboard and supervised the animation.
But it is in high-tech terms that the ad scores a first. “Instead of the conventional cell animation techniques, Catherine’s 2D illustrations were animated into 3D scenes, creating a deliberate dissonance,” explains Fawa Conradie, director of The Worx.
Although the effects are as 3D as those of high-tech blockbusters such as Jurassic Park or Toy Story, the space in which the commercial has been created is treated more as a theatre stage than a film set. “Each element in the scene can be described as a paper-thin cardboard cut out”, explains Dale Newtown who, together with Matthew Lowery, was responsible for the animation.
“Where this type of animation departs from tradition is that only one drawing is required for each type of shot as opposed to the conventional one-drawing-per-frame technique.”
The artwork is scanned into the computer and a grid is created which matches the basic form of the artwork. It is “pasted” on to the grid and when points on the grid are moved about, the artwork distorts accordingly, creating facial animation. Limb movement is created by linking a skeleton to the grid whose “joints” are manipulated in the way one would operate a puppet.
Another unconventional animation method is the reverse order in which the commercial was produced. “Animated productions are traditionally done first with sound followed by animation,” says Jupiter’s Creative Directors Lawrence Seftel and Wayne Antill. “We went for animation first because we had to wait for permission to use Blur’s Song 2 … This made creating the soundtrack even more challenging.”