Take a bored ad copywriting team with a flair for the peculiar, plop them into a creative environment where practically anything goes, and you might get something like the 11 delightfully demented MTV spots from New York-based creative team Uncooked that aired during August's Video Music Awards.

New York-based Natalie Carbone and Armand Prisco formed Uncooked as a way to channel their more bizarre creative inclinations while working at McCann Erickson. One of their first projects was a series of self-described "strange and snarky" greeting cards, sporting such un-Hallmark sentiments as "It's Valentine's Day and I'm so happy we're together. But if you ever leave me I'll kill you." On a whim, the team endeavored to peddle their wares with a booth at a national stationary show in New York - "a total freak show," says Carbone, while Prisco recalls "it was full of mom jeans and doilies." But the end result was worth it - Urban Outfitters carried the cards in all of their US stores.

Thinking MTV might be receptive to their brand of weird, the team sent the cards to MTV NY senior VP of on-air promotions Kevin Mackall, who subsequently nabbed Uncooked for freelance work. Carbone left the ad office first, with Prisco following in June ("It was probably the greatest thing I ever did," he says contentedly).

"We always thought there'd be something more we could do with the style of the greeting cards - turning them into animated little pieces," says Carbone. After she saw a brief involving "getting MTV back to its musical roots", Uncooked enlisted animator Jeremy Miller and composer/sound designer Jay Lifton of Pulse Music to help create three spots, starring a rat, lice and a magic unicorn respectively (sample copy: "There's only one magical unicorn that can play music... but he just died."). Mixing flash with old-school cel animation, the spec spots were suitably screwy for MTV and the network signed on for eight more, featuring singing worms, guitar-eating robots and, of course, a dancing ham.

"We were instructed to make them funny and make them good," says Prisco about MTV's involvement in the process. "We could pretty much do whatever we wanted."

The team hopes to have more MTV projects underway, and is currently hard at work incorporating the ham and the unicorn in a pitch for an animated series, loosely based on other characters that appear in Uncooked's baby clothes line. Yes, we said baby clothes.

"We had to figure out what the next step was," says Prisco about their post-card ambitions. "A lot of card companies start making things like magnets and mugs and stupid shit like that."

Uncooked http://www.uncookedland.com
MTV http://www.mtv.com