TAC Wanted “More Visible Injuries”: How Clems and Mighty Nice Made Toy Ads to Teach Men About E-Scooter Dangers
Stop motion animation inherently has a childlike quality. Which is why Clems’ recent spots for Victoria’s Transport Accident Commission were so interesting: they combined stop motion with the grisly injuries you can sustain while dangerously riding an e-scooter.
Clems’ CCO Adrián Flores, creative director Derek Anderson, and senior creative Ellie Dunn, along with Mighty Nice director Darren Price, and producer Chloe Marshall explain why they now have “the hippest Barbie clothing collection in Sydney” after scouring the globe for tiny outfits, and shooting 4.5 seconds worth of footage each day.
LBB> Why choose to go all out with the gore when flipping from animation to real life?
Derek> We needed to show how serious the consequences are of misusing an e-scooter. So we wanted to make sure it was gruesome to the younger audience. It wouldn’t be a TAC ad without a true sense of reality and a moment that makes you want to turn away. I describe it as a reverse mullet: party in the front, real gruesome in the back.
LBB> What were the highlights and challenges of the project? And how did you overcome the challenges?
Derek> We had some pretty ambitious ideas. And the one we landed on was the most ambitious of all given the timeline. But when I saw the tiny little wardrobe, it was all worthwhile. And then when we saw them as real humans, that was really special.
Ellie> Getting through to a young male audience was always going to be tricky. So we chose something we knew would capture their eyeballs––toys.
Adrián> We had to turn this around very quickly. Which is not ideal for stop motion! But luckily the Mighty Nice crew know their shit. The TAC team wanting more visible injuries will stay with me. Not a client note you get often in advertising.
LBB> Talk us through what a typical production day looked like for this campaign?
Darren and Chloe> Each morning our set up could take anywhere between 30 minutes to a few hours, depending on the complexity of the shot and what we had shot the day before.
Our CG lead was also on set to adjust the Unreal engine 3D set extensions on the LED screen, as they needed to be matched to the camera position and lighting per shot. No two days were the same and with four TVCs to shoot across four different sets in six days, with nine characters, we had a lot of frames to get through! On a typical shoot day we shot roughly 4.5 seconds of animation.
Stop motion is a feat, but once the background and characters are in place, and the cameras and lights are set, it’s also magical to watch it unfold.
LBB> What came first? The real actors or the stop motion figures?
Darren and Chloe> The stop motion figures came first and it was exciting to see how closely the real actors were cast to match our character designs.
We had to scour the globe and online marketplaces around the world to find tailored 1/6th scale outfits. Given the tight pre-production timeline, some of the clothes we selected initially didn’t look like they’d make it in time, and we also had to ensure we were aligning with the wardrobe for the live action which was in pre-production around the same time. This meant some miniature wardrobe items ended up being hand-stitched, embroidered, or even dyed to make sure everything was a perfect match with the live action equivalent.
Needless to say - we now have the hippest Barbie clothing collection in Sydney.
LBB> What unique challenges did this campaign present on the animation front?
Darren and Chloe> This was a more physically demanding shoot than others because we had lots of shots to get through in a short amount of time, and high action sequences which meant forcing dolls into new positions and stretching the animators to physically manipulate them.
We were working to quite a tight schedule: two weeks pre-production, a six-day shoot, seven days of post. During this time, we designed, modelled, printed and painted over 60 heads, 12 pigeons, created 9 unique doll characters, built 4 different practical sets and accompanying CG environments, then shot and post-produced all four films. Not recommended*, but impressive!
*For the uninitiated, we would generally recommend a production timeline of 10-12 weeks for an animated 30s TVC, but this was too good a project to back away from.
LBB> The idea of a toy ad that is expressed at the beginning of the spots and embedded throughout the radio ad is ingenious, how did you arrive at that idea?
Adrián> The toy insight came from our strategy team, specifically the Reddit thread-obsessed Ness Quincey who found that a lot of people describe e-scooters as toys. But that’s part of our usual briefing process. Our team dives into social listening to see how real people talk about the issue at hand as much as possible.
LBB> Talk to me also about the radio ads. Why did radio work for this idea, and why did you choose to spotlight it?
Adrian> Well I’m a writer, so I think radio is fun. The power of words and all that. And radio is a highly effective medium with mass reach. To be honest, the real question is: why isn’t radio highlighted more often by the industry? That said, the actual reason we’re so gung-ho on radio at Clems is that Ellie is obsessed with it, and I’m scared of what she’ll do to me if I don’t feed her good radio briefs.
Ellie> We loved the idea of making radio ads that started out like classic toy ads. A catchy jingle, a hammy voiceover, you know the ones. Selling them took a lot of singing in client presentations (very beautifully I might add) and recording our own demos. After briefing the legends at Squeak E Clean, they came back with a jingle that was a little 80s, a little Transformers, and we knew we were on a roll.
Working with Paul Le Couteur as our VO talent Stephen Briggs read out super gruesome e-scooter injuries in a wildly over-the-top toy commercial voice will remain a career highlight.
