Carmichael Lynch, Minneapolis, used a blend of stop motion characters with swappable live action heads to create the final spot to be produced by the agency for its former client Ikea.

Carmichael Lynch creatives Libby Brockhoff, Randy Tatum, Steve Casey and Tom Camp and agency producer Sean Healey worked with Toronto's Head Gear Animation to create this odd commercial directed by Head Gear's co-founder Steve Angel. The spot shows a yuppie couple dining together in an upscale, Ikea-furnished loft (the miniature set was built by Alex Savazzi and features functioning mood lighting and tiny houseplants). The male head, a boorish business-type, patters on endlessly much to the boredom of his female head dinner companion. In frustration, she stands, removes his head (which continues blathering on) and opens a closet full of other options. She selects a much suaver Rastafarian head, drops it onto the body and resumes her meal with renewed sassy-ness.

Various members of the creative and production team make cameos as closet-dwelling heads. The heads were shot against a green screen while the stop motion was shot on digital video.

"The first thing we did was figure out what the shots, angles and compositions would be like, where all the eyelines would be; we shot the heads and then the animation," says Angel. "The tricky thing is having animation and live action exist in the same space. If the animation is too cartoon-y, the heads look weird and if the actors aren't emotive enough, the bodies will look strange."

Animator Drew Lightfoot fabricated and animated the stop motion characters.

"They have ball and socket armatures on the inside, so I can control them accurately. They are covered in a thin, foam latex skin and we made their clothes and created this whole little world where they dwell," describes Lightfoot. "As for animation, basically I rotoscoped, looking for every single frame of animation to find out at exactly what point the fork is coming into the mouth and at what point he shrugs his shoulder while saying a word. It all ties together since it's all in one shot."

Post was handled by an in-house team at Head Gear, headed by Kyle Sim, using Adobe After Effects to composite the live action and stop motion elements of the spot.

Webfiles:

Carmichael Lynch> http://www.clynch.com
Head Gear Animation> http://www.headgearanimation.com