Hasta La Creative!

On behalf of Brand New School, it’s our pleasure to share this spot that director Jonathan Notaro and his BNS colleagues have recently created for advertising agency Mother New York as part of its “Love Thy Pits” campaign for Mitchum.

The campaign contributions from BNS include three :30 spots in total, including this latest one entitled “Dawson’s Kid.”

Jonathan and BNS producer Toby Sowers provided this summary of the project’s unique production approach:

Together with director of photography Eric Treml, Jonathan and the BNS team used the ARRI Alexa digital camera system to capture their HD source footage during three days of production on-stage.

“We essentially painted animation on people’s skin, using a fusion of digital and practical techniques,” Jonathan explained. “After exploring different ways of accomplishing the desired effect, we filmed people with real paint on their skin, then we animated artwork using traditional cel animation techniques, where we matched the practical paint used in the live-action shoot. The animation was then composited onto their skin using seamless digital visual effects.”

BNS artists tracked the form of the human body using mocha, then animated what they wanted on the body using cel animation with hand-drawn artwork. They then projected their animation onto the tracked body and composited the work in Nuke to make it feel like actual paint. Final color was handled in Autodesk Flame.

Several high-res stills and much more campaign information are available with the campaign press release, which you can find here: http://bit.ly/PitLove

The spot’s credits follow below. Thanks very much for your interest!