View Koodo HERE

Spy Films’ Arno Salters directs latest Koodo campaign for TAXI2.

Why this approach?

AS: The creatives originally wanted the characters in the spots to “dance” in some way from one line-up to the next. Koodo is a pretty campy brand and I suspected there might be a push for the actors to smile and show some teeth, so I felt like the dancing might need to be stylized in some form in order to offset the overall campiness. I offered 2 options – one was to have them do a bizarre synchronized choreography à la “calvin harris, girls” and the other was pixilation. They immediately dug the pixilation approach.

Were there any production hurdles?

AS: The biggest hurdle was having only 3 days to shoot these 3 spots. There’s 10-12 seconds of pixilation in each spot on top of the regular live action, and you’d normally need a full 3 shoot days for that alone. Isaac King (animation director) and I decided that the best way to deal with this would be to turn the actors into autonomous animation machines, so that we wouldn’t have to individually animate them frame-by-frame. So we had a rehearsal day where we explained the process to all of them and explained how all their movements would have to be incremental. Most of them looked at us like we were aliens at first, but they eventually all really got into it – actors usually respond really well to having a precise technical job to focus on, on top of their characters.

Another issue was figuring out how to go seamlessly from pixilation (frame by frame) to live action (24 fps) in the same shots. The answer to that ended up being the Sony EX3, which you can do both with. Great little camera.

View Arno Salters REEL HERE

You can read the whole thing here

Meanwhile Boards published an interesting interview that really got to the heart of what he’s all about: a childhood spent trying to impress his (now internationally famous) siblings, youthful flirtation with Political Theory and Russian at the LSE and his struggles to escape being labeled as “a stop-motion guy”.

Read his take on the evils of CGI and the beauty of imperfection here