The last time Smith & Foulkes made a commercial for Honda, with the genre changing Honda “Grrr” spot, it became the most talked about (and awarded) animated ad of the last 10 years. It’s also fair to say that the advertising output from Honda is truly innovative and always eagerly anticipated. We were therefore very excited to be involved in helping to craft their latest collaboration, “This Unpredictable Life”.
The tale is told through a poem recited by Garrison Keillor, the author and radio broadcaster whose gravelly voice has become synonymous with the Power of Dreams campaign from “Grrr” to “Impossible Dream”.
The story follows our character from birth to adulthood, meeting his partner along the way and starting a family of his own. The new Jazz features at the end of the spot, it’s multiple seat configurations cleverly adapting themselves to deal with everything life’s journey brings with it. It’s a typically brave approach from the creative team of Chris Groom and Sam Heath at W+K where only 10 seconds of screen time is given to the car in a 60 second product commercial.
The resulting journey is great fun to watch and speaks volumes for Smith & Foulkes’ ability to embue a narrative with detail, richness and of course charm.
The 3D was skillfully designed and animated in house at Nexus by a 30 strong team of multi-disciplined artists. 3D lead and all round virtuoso Ben Cowell headed up the crew even putting his honeymoon on hold to bring this one in.
Time Based Arts were involved from the earliest stages of the project with Sheldon Gardner helping develop style frames for the pitch. This collaboration from the outset proved fruitful as it allowed for a continuity to the look development right through to delivery.
Smith & Foulkes were keen to contrast the simple character designs with elaborate and atmospheric environments which had to feel expansive and epic. It was a very intense post process as the nature of the look meant that the disparate elements for the scenes (including the animated layers, particles, grading and stylisation) could be viewed in context for the first time only in the composite. We worked tirelessly to realise each scene. This allowed for direction and creative input to be fed back to the 3D team where needed and further finesse the end result.
An additional challenge was the fact that the entire 60 second commercial is told in a flowing narrative that has only two obvious cuts.
This lead to very large setups with hundreds of layers needing to be invisibly joined with each subsequent and equally complicated sequence. It was an intense project yet the nature of working with such a creative team made it a hugely rewarding process.
W+K have even developed an iPhone app that allows you to snatch bespoke animations of the characters that feature in the film interactively whilst its playing on your telly!
Special thanks to Ben’s understanding wife Sarah!
Agency: Wieden+Kennedy London
Creative Directors: Sam Heath, Chris Groom
Agency Producer: James Guy
Production Company: Nexus
Directors: Smith & Foulkes
Exec Producer: Julia Parfitt
Producer: Tracey Cooper
CG Supervisor: Ben Cowell
Sound Design: Aaron Reynolds @ Wave
Music: Bruno Coulais
Time Based Arts
Flame: Sheldon Gardner, Mike Skrgatic, James Allen.