The team at Bent learned something new about director Rob Shaw when TAXI2 approached us with the idea for “El Tabador,” a 4-inch tall animated Mexican Wrestler.

'I have to do this campaign,' Rob said as soon as he found the character in the agency’s script for Koodo Mobile’s Tabador campaign. We quickly discovered the reason: In addition to robots, comics and Sci-Fi, our director is seriously into Mexican and American Pro Wrestling.

Research for this project looked a lot like play as Rob dove into hours of classic Lucha Libre films. His excitement and knowledge of the semi-obscure subject was contagious, and pretty soon his whole team was into Mexican Wrestling. By the time production was under way, it wasn’t odd to see CG animators wearing Lucha Libre masks around the water cooler.

From character design through final animation, Rob and the team worked closely with the agency to craft a computer-generated character with the big, theatrical physical performance of a pro wrestler and the heroic, suave personality of a classic Luchador. Everyone at Bent was excited to get such an original, interesting character concept from the agency, and that excitement definitely comes through in the final animation.

Lance Martin, ECD of TAXI2, put it this way: 'We always hoped the character would be fun and charming, but it was the fantastic work that Bent did that really took things to the next level.'

Boffswana are excited to announce the release of their latest project for Saatchi and Saatchi New York and their client General Mills' product Honey Nut Cheerios. 'Honeyway Train' is an Augmented Reality (AR) game where the player controls the entire experience using the Honey Nut Cheerios cereal box. This is a world first AR project using the Unity3D engine in this way.

The game represents 6 months of development to create an Augmented Reality experience in Unity3D. It is also very gratifying for us to be launching our second project for Saatchi and Saachi NY, they have a great vision and have shown tremendous faith in our abilities.

To read more about the game, please see the case study on our web page.

Continuing the success of their “ink drop” campaign for the Los Angeles Times, we helped TBWA/Chiat/Day create a star studded world with these two outdoor and theatrical spots for their award season special section

Not To Scale directing duo Ubik were approached by Jon Chads, Joe Koprowski & Laura Duffy from BMB to create a film for Laterooms.com that retained all the warmth and charm of discovering a beautiful place to stay. We all know what’s like, the flight’s booked but you haven’t decided where you want to stay, rustic or modern, city or coast, both? How do you represent the endless available choice, with brilliantly realised and crafted animation of course.

A combination of Live action plates and 3D animated worlds are composited together to create a mini odyssey that starts in a bustling city hotel, moves onto a secluded coastal bed and breakfast, continues to a sunny European villa via a visit to a remote Scottish castle and many more besides.

The mini hostelries appear in giant thought bubbles which again appear perfectly set within an everyday live action setting. To help capture the realism further, reference bowls of jelly were prepared the night before to capture reference of reflections for shooting, lighting and caustics. Along with the use of some lovely reflective Lego kindly borrowed from children’s toy boxes on location.

It was important to produce a very detailed pre-visualization before shooting began, to ensure this, the location was sourced very early on to ensure that the crew had an excellent idea of how they needed to work the available space so that the camera could move in accordance to the planned CG world, however Ubik wanted to strike a balance, retaining a hand held camera feel and not enforce the DOP, Tim Green with the very motion control look of a Pre Vis.

Tim’s main difficulties whilst shooting was having to imagine these worlds in completely empty space. So the team had rehearsals and walk throughs with balloons on sticks (Very high Tech!)

Four weeks of intensive animation production followed at Not To Scale with a small but perfectly formed crew of 3D Animators, modelers, texturers and lighting specialists. Who worked tirelessly in Xsi to add all of the intricate details and warm lighting and textures that Ubik wanted to squeeze into each perfectly formed world.

Nick Losse one half of Ubik adds;

“Bubbles was one of those rare projects that comes along every so often wherein we were given the opportunity to design and craft a film the way we wanted to make it.

The whole team, from the client downwards were really behind the creative brief from the offset making the production process a truly collaborative effort. We worked closely with a supportive and trusting agency team and client to finesse the pacing and styling of the film- resulting in a warm, charming and inviting film that was a lot of fun to make and that will make the Laterooms online service really stand out. Now we’re ready to book a break”.

For the global release of the Clash of the Titans movie Warner Bros approached Boffswana to help them Release the Kraken!

Using a Unity3D custom built 3D webplayer Boffswana were able to create an augmented reality experience that brings the ferocious fictional sea monster to life in a realistic ocean environment.

Once released people could get the Kraken to roar or strike via keyboard activation.

The use of this type of 3D engine in augmented reality is a world first in entertainment marketing.

Remember to turn up the speaker volume.

In a year that's sure to be filled with World Cup football mayhem, my latest production for
Castrol features the biggest name in soccer today, Christiano Ronaldo.

Conceptualized by Ogilvy South Africa, the commercial follows the journey of Ronaldo - the priciest sport star in the world - as he travels and performs under extreme conditions.

Achieving a epic feeling commercial was no small feat considering the star could only spare 5 hours for the filming of the ad.

As a director you always want to contribute not only to the cinematic feel and production value of the spot, but you also want to make sure that the concept comes to life in an entertaining and engaging way for the audience.

After showing the ad to him Mom, Ronaldo got in touch with us to report she has asked for a copy of the spot. Nice to know you're never to fast or too famous to make your mama proud.

To help build excitement for the launch of the newest Nike Zoom, we were commissioned by Nike Direct to create a massive sculpture of Los Angeles Lakers shooting guard Kobe Bryant.

Below is selected concept art, real world applications as well as preliminary design and material explorations

Originally intended as an art installation for the brand, the carbon-modelled statue ultimately evolved into part of an elaborate proposed marketing campaign that included both outdoor and in-store components.

Using up to 3 or 4 still cameras at the same time, over a 2 days shoot, we took nearly 25,000 photos to create this series of 7 spots for the BBC Electric Proms. I then edited the stills together, literally frame by frame to complete the animations.

We had a ton of fun making the “Must Drink More Milk” virals for the BC Dairy Foundation.

Each of the spots called for a unique animation style that really let our imaginations run with the concepts, and being viral web videos, the agency’s scripts were more random and risqué a typical commercial. The risk definitely paid off in pure entertainment value.

It turns out people in Canada enjoy watching them as much as we liked making them.

“Russian Dolls” earned a silver in the animation category of Advertising & Design Club of Canada’s annual award ceremony.

Early this year, the campaign cleaned up at The Bessies with awards including:
Best of show (Campaign)
Best Series (Campaign)
Gold Spots (2 single spot golds, and 3 Campaign spot golds)
Finalist TV (1 single spot, and 2 Campaign)
Finalist Online (2 single spots, and 3 Campaign)
Finalist integrated (2 campaign spots)
Craft Award (3 single spots)

Created by AMV BBDO ‘Bots’ depicts a monotonous robotic world which is injected with fun by the discovery and distribution of Mars Planets. The tasting of the bite-size chocolate balls breaks the robots routine and ultimately leads to a massive city wide dance party!

The 30 second advert was inspired by the French duo, award winning animated short film. Their beautiful, funny characterization meant that they were an obvious choice for AMV creatives’ Jez Tribe and Prabs Wignarajah to visualize this story for MARS PLANETS.

Animated in XSI the duo spent many weeks finetuning a very detailed CG pre-vis before thir crack team of french and Polish animators descended on Not To Scale’s Dean Street studio to commence further character modelling texture and lighting. The challenge was fitting the whole narrative into just 30”. With the placement of nearly every frame been weighed up and agonised over from an early stage.

The mixed up track of beats and baselines by DJ Mr Thing, formerly of the Scratch Perverts, provides the perfect trigger to send the sterile robot world a little crazy.

The original ‘mix it up’ strap-line remains at the core of this new advert through the transformation of the robot world and the soundtrack that has been mixed up by Hip Hop maestro Mr Thing especially for MARS PLANETS. Both these creative elements were selected to depict the brand proposition of ‘mixing up’ the different chocolate flavoured balls.