A new animated campaign for Pot Noodles brought together agency HHCL, London production company Baby Films and New York's Curious Pictures.

"Ants" and "Tongue Tied" are 40-second spots based around a hybrid animation style which is essentially live action combined with graphic elements, creating cartoon characters that move and speak with extremely realistic consistency. Curious Pictures director Joan Raspo first made use of the technique for her Oxygen Media series Avenue Amy.

"Ants" tells the tale of an exterminator too caught up in his noodles to boil a colony out of a distraught woman's kitchen. "Tongue Tied" has a teacher who at first boils water to free a boy whose tongue is frozen to a school yard pole; she too is soon distracted and instead uses the water for her Pot Noodles.

"The strategy of selfishness comes from the fact that Pot Noodles are quite small, something you wouldn't want to share with anyone else, just fill the kettle and go for it maniacally," says Mike Oughton, the HHCL art director for the campaign. "Sod everything else, it just goes out the window."

Oughton says the agency first came across the animation technique (which Curious terms "the process") at a North American animation fair. Making the connection between the cartoony packaging of Pot Noodles, the creatives felt the look would have visual impact on the UK market. Curious VFX supervisor Lewis Kofsky flew to London to supervise the live-action portion of the shoot, which was handled by Steve Bendelack of London's Baby Films.

The actors for the spots were dressed and made up in readily keyable colors and shot on green screen.

"Lewis took loads of still photographs of the kinds of things they would draw the sets from like the school and typical English streets, things you couldn't replicate in America," says Oughton. 3D virtual sets were constructed from Kofsky's photos.

"And while we normally don't cast actors recently seen in a commercial or on telly, all we had to do here was get the very best people we could because they wouldn't be recognizable."

Along with Raspo, Kofsky was instrumental in developing the process. "We are trying to walk the line between the great things of a live performance and the magic of animation," says Kofsky. He and the Curious animation team took the footage shot by Bendelack and enhanced it in Adobe After Effects. Outlines were then added to the visuals via cel animation to better define the characters, and lighting was added with 3D Studio Max.

"All the elements are London based so we photographed locations and all the actors there. Bendelack does have something of an animation background, since he was one of the original 'Spitting Image' team."

Kofsky says the team used a lot of the same techniques as used in creating Avenue Amy, including filming in digital video to facilitate the addition of animation/graphic elements.

"The London team brought a lot to it in terms of costuming and make-up, and Steve shot things dynamically, really pushing the framing and camera work beyond where we had gone before," says Kofsky. "We had a live feed from the camera straight to our computers where we composited the mix, so we could see in real time on set how they actually look in their animated environment."

To view some Pot Noodle spots:

http://boardsmag.com/screeningroom/

HHCL> www.hhcl.com

Curious Pictures> www.curiouspictures.com