It's the kind of open-ended board that simultaneously encompasses a director's dream scenario and his biggest nightmare. Last December, TBWA\London approached RSA's Alex Rutterford and The Mill, London with a brief that was so abstract and so FX-driven that nobody had the foggiest notion how it might actually look when it was all said and done. Exciting? Yes. Terrifying? Absolutely.

Designed to promote Sony's PSP handheld console, the brief called for the creation of a CG figure comprised of four symbols (a camera, music note, film strip and game controller) representing the unit's many applications. That, according to The Mill's Ben Smith, was pretty much where the board began and ended - the rest of the design issues laid squarely on the shoulders of the production and FX team.

"Roughly speaking, [the brief] was to create an ever-changing, morphing, non-descriptive yet figurative, mechanical yet organic thing that was continually changing over time but still looked as if it had weight and character and interacted with real world environments," the 3D supervisor explains. "So from the outset we knew the really hard bit about getting this to look good would be figuring out the language of animation we could use throughout the whole piece."

One of the biggest challenges involved fashioning a suitably compelling creature (eventually dubbed 'The Icon') out of a mere four shapes, a task akin to building a Gaudi replica using only four different kinds of Lego blocks. After looking to his design and 3D background for clues, Rutterford struck upon a compromise that maintained the integrity of the concept while giving The Mill more material to work with.

"There's a famous character on British television called Bertie Basset that's made up out of these licorice candies, and [the agency] were [originally] thinking in terms of that," Rutterford says. "I thought there was absolutely no way this thing was actually going to look good if it was just a man made up of symbols. So I made [new] abstract symbols by mashing the objects up - I subtracted one shape from another to get another interesting shape - and built that up into an interesting character. That's where we came back into what the agency originally had... we just supercharged the original idea a little bit."

Shot in London last spring, "A Day In The Life" starts in an art gallery, where The Icon is posing as a geometric sculpture. To the shock of gallery goers, it comes alive and begins a :60 citywide rampage that takes it into a rail yard, through a motorway tunnel, down an escalator, and into a bus station car park, where it engages in a climactic fight with another Icon that sends them both up a crane and ultimately careening back down to earth, piece by piece.

For Rutterford, an accomplished 3D animator and graphic designer whose resume includes numerous images and videos for techno boundary-pushers Autechre as well as credits on Chris Cunningham's most technically demanding pieces, the five-day shoot proved by far to be the easiest portion of the job. Thanks to on-set VFX supervisors from The Mill and 3D tests done on his laptop, he had a clear sense of how the spot was going to flow. "I'd actually built a crude working wireframe shaded animatic of a tunnel or some tops of trains. I literally started to pull out the shots and run the animatics [during the shoot]," he says. "It helped me to think about where I could put the camera, how this thing was going to cut and how fast it would move."

The hard part, of course, came over the next four months, during which a team of 14 animators worked day and night to realize The Icon's jaw-dropping magnitude. As the design wore on, The Icon accumulated additional levels of complexity that would dwarf Rutterford's original concept. "Initially there were maybe eight individual elements," Smith says. "What we ended up with was 40 individual elements that were all moving in and out of each other."

According to Smith, the job's biggest challenge wasn't the rendering or the task of making The Icon look like part of a live-action environment, but rather "the unquantifiableness of the animation when we really didn't know what it was going to do and how it was going to do it". As a result, he says, trial and error was a huge part of the job. "You can't say it's supposed to look like this or that; you just have to try a lot of things and see if they work. We went through so many iterations of different shots - we probably animated one shot 20 to 25 times, almost from scratch every time."

For Rutterford, the job proved a daunting first step into the world of commercial-making. Although "A Day In The Life" officially marked his debut as a spot director, it was such a long process that he's currently on a well-deserved sabbatical. "My brain has erased the whole incident," he jokes. "It was like half a year of my life. When people say 'How long did it take' I can honestly say I don't actually know because I felt like I was stuck in Groundhog Day. I was pretty much living out of [The Mill] every single day from half-ten in the morning to late at night, and that was six to seven days a week, just living at that place. After a little while, stuff can really, really get to you."

TBWA\London> www.tbwa-london.com
RSA> www.rsafilms.com
The Mill> www.mill.co.uk