A picture may speak a thousand words, but metaphors, any good writer will argue, can elevate matter-of-fact prose into poetic fantasy. Furthermore, they're untrammeled by inconvenient considerations of reality... usually. Combining the fanciful with the fathomable was the challenge facing Goodby, Silverstein & Partners, San Francisco and Biscuit Filmworks USA director Noam Murro in their visual counterpart to the agency's hugely successful, hyperbolic radio work for Comcast, espousing the Internet provider's ongoing efforts to make fast faster.

"Rabbit" opens on a desert scene, where our buck-toothed protagonist licks from a bottle, and is transformed, the voice-over tells us, into an unlikely rabbit-panther hybrid... That suddenly sprouts turbines... And is backed by an unusually strong tailwind... On ice... Shaved with a cold-forged, surgical grade razor... and so on. The ridiculous excesses of speed culminate with the über-bunny being driven by a lead-footed, over-caffeinated fighter pilot onto a Swiss ski jump.

"It's hard to describe how much faster [Comcast] is getting," says GSPSF associate creative director Mike McKay. "So we said, 'Maybe it's a rabbit turning into a panther [and so on].' Fast getting faster is pretty simple and I felt that when we came up with it, it seemed like such an easy 'get'."

As easy as it seemed, "it was ambitious to put a picture to it. It was a two-year process," sighs McKay. "This job took six months of prep, was a six-day shoot, and felt like six years in post," jokes Murro, who says he picked the script based on the originality of the narrative, the strength of the copy and the emotion throughout.

The spot's gestation was lengthened primarily by the financial and technical constraints of its almost fully CG nature, and the creative headaches of translating the OTT imagery of a radio spot to TV. "It was very difficult to figure out what we'd see next and how we'd see it," says McKay. "So we would do pre-viz and animatics and say, 'How do we get here, to this next part?'" Accordingly, some copy was cut from the radio spot, notably a section about the creature in an industrial blender.

Although there were live-action elements, including the opening rabbit scenes (actually shot over three days in a desert outside LA) and those of the pilot, the vast majority of the spot is CG. For the complex execution Murro and Goodby turned from the outset to seasoned Australian effects house Animal Logic (the CG team behind the hit animated feature Happy Feet). "We wanted to push the production value," says Animal Logic creative director Bruce Carter. "The more real the rabbit/panther thingie and its environment looked, the more ridiculous and hapless the creature seemed and the funnier the spot became."

Matching the quality of the CG to the live action was just one of the many challenges that Carter and his team of 14 faced through the three-month production process. "The spot was very challenging technically because first you have a character performance. But also there are massive amounts of surfaces, from fur, to fur with wind blowing on it, to metal, to the visual effects." The changing terrain, from desert to tarmac road, to ice and finally snow also added the complexities of differing light conditions to the mix. The team used Maya for the CGI, Flame for compositing the spot and Photoshop for matte painting from photographic plates.

Both McKay and Murro lay huge credit at the feet of Animal Logic, saying it was a third creative partner throughout the affair. Murro had twice-weekly conversations or meetings with the Sydney-based company throughout the pre-production and production processes to discuss progress and make changes. Rather than hampering the workflow, the differing time zones worked in their favor. Changes could be made in Sydney while LA slept, and approvals and suggestions resolved and relayed back to Sydney in time for their morning.

Care was taken to make the various elements of the spot - rabbit, jet engine, even the panther-rabbit hybrid - appear realistic, however bizarre the construct. "I think it's less surprising when it's pushed too far visually," says McKay. "When you see things happening in cartoons they can do pretty much whatever they want and it doesn't surprise you. So we wanted to anchor it as much as we could in reality." Murro added touches such as a shack blowing up to amplify the animal's haplessness. "I think the idea was this rabbit/panther is fucked and it's beyond his control," he says. "We had serious discussions about that... the emotional side of it."

As for the experience working primarily in CG, Murro says it's a much different mindset. "A lot of times you direct things and it all happens instantly. With this [process], you give your notes and they're implemented. Directing CG is just a set of filters. First the big stuff - narrative and character - then [you go] smaller and smaller... motion, details and visuals.

"The rabbit keeps going faster and faster but the process of making a spot like this takes forever," he adds. "You really have to believe in it, stick with it and wait for it to emerge. CGI spots tend to be horrible for a long, long time and then suddenly, at the very end of the process, if you're lucky, something amazing can come out the other end."

Goodby, Silverstein & Partners http://www.goodbysilverstein.com
Biscuit Filmworks USA http://www.biscuitfilmworks.com
Animal Logic http://www.animallogic.com