You know when you’re on the cell phone and you forget about the world around you? In these two spots for Vodafone, we show how users create their own imaginary world when they’re talking or texting. Of course, this ‘personalization’ of their surroundings
also stands in as a metaphor for personalizing your phone as well as your price plan.
At the beginning of each spot, the filmed frame shrinks down to a sort of cell phone screen size, and everything on the outside of that frame gets replaced by funky creatures as well as signifiers for communication. After considering a series of vignettes linked by graphic transitions, we decided to shoot the whole thing in one go, using a steadicam tracking backwards with our hero for the entire length of the spot.
Shooting a one-shot commercial of course requires a great deal of choreography. We wrote a bunch of story ideas, of things crossing the path of our hero: Bicycles, dogs, strollers, kites, joggers and pedestrians. The real things within the center frame then turned into something more fantastic as they crossed the border to the outside world.
The two locations in Los Angeles were dressed to look like England: A bunch of greenery, a flower shop and smaller cars made 4th Street appear like London, and a rose garden stolen from “Blow Up” turned Whittier Park just south of downtown into Maryon Park.
The illustration styles of the two TVCs was also translated into a series of print ads that should be all over the UK right about now. The print photography was handled by Melodie McDaniel.
When you want to create something that looks like hand drawn illustration, you obviously run into problems if you want to do at least some of the tracking in 3D. In these spots, there are drawings in the background that stay in the frame but get smaller over fifteen seconds. Not only do you want to keep the line weight consistent, you also want some interpretation of how an illustrator would draw less and less detail the further we get from the element. You’d want to do all of that without having to draw 700 or even just 350 frames by hand.
It turned out that a complicated mix of all sorts of techniques did the trick. The animation is part pencil and part vector. The tracking is done in part through cel animation, in part through 3D tracking and in part by simple tracing of the live action footage.
A big thanks to our awesome steadicam operator and DP Andrew Rowlands, our fantastic producer David Wolfson and, as always, our production designer Robert Fox. That kite prep weekend made all the difference.
