TOYOTA AND SAATCHI NY GET DIGITAL WITH SAAM GABBAY’S HUMUNCULUS

When it came time for Saatchi NY to develop and launch a new regional campaign for Toyota, the agency contracted animation and creative expert Saam Gabbay and his design company, Humunculus. Together they produced an alter-reality animated world to communicate Toyota’s new brand messaging to the masses.

Saatchi NY’s clients are regional Toyota Dealer Associations. Usually these groups look to create ads with a lot of car running footage accompanied by an announcer shouting about lease prices and APR financing. But this time they instead went for something totally different. “For a TDA to agree to do a SIXTY second commercial with no prices, or even mentioning a model by name, is pretty unprecedented,” says Tim Leake, writer for Saatchi NY.

Animation Beats Live Action
“We were originally going to shoot a live-action spot, but the budget was getting out-of-control and it just didn’t make sense,” explains Leake. “We had already created an animated mnemonic for the end of every spot in the campaign, so it made a lot of sense to use the anthem as an opportunity to build extra meaning and brand recognition to that mnemonic. And the cost savings was substantial — which the clients loved.”

There were advantages to taking this different approach. “Animation stands out, because most spots are live action,” says Leake. “You can achieve feelings and moods and looks in animation that are just impossible in live-action film.”

Leake and Gabbay had worked together on an animated spot for Kinko’s in 1998. So for this new spot, Leake decided to track down Gabbay and ask him to bid on the job. Gabbay put together a team for Humunculus and his enthusiasm for the project beat out a competing bid from one of New York’s top visual-effects companies, Trialex.

Something Different
The concept for this spot was to show that — since the beginning of time — it’s been a good thing to be smart, and the concept treatment sought to create a shiny, 3D world with some of the objects made out of glass. “It’s completely weird, but they went for it,” says Gabbay. “And they even allowed us to stylize their cars to fit the treatment.”

Giving consistency to Toyota’s branding, everything in the commercial is about the oval, which is the shape of Toyota’s logo. “You can see the rings in the trees and the fish bowl — the trees, the shape of the computer screen, the cave, it’s all about this shape,” explains Gabbay.

This is the kind of project Gabbay lives for. “How many times do you get to blow up a glass pig, build a giant treadmill... Do you know what I mean?” he asks.

Developing a Niche for All Ads Auto
Gabbay is well versed in the essence of auto. He’s already worked on several car commercials and this niche suits him well. “I’ve had maybe 15 cars, so I really get them and understand them,” he says. “I love the dynamics of cars, I’m just really mesmerized by the car as an object and I also have a lot of respect for the amount of stress that a client has in creating ads for a large corporation.”

Custom Teams for Every Spot
The reason that Humunculus consistently lands gigs cutting commercials for stellar brands like Acura, Infiniti and now Toyota, has everything to do with its custom approach to each project. “If you were to look at our reel, there is no way you could say ‘That’s Humunculus,’” says Gabbay. “We are so not set in our ways. Our work is super diverse — from glowing car mnemonics, to weird hand-animated or clean 3D work. We let the job dictate the style rather than imposing a common style on every project.”

Gabbay puts together a custom team for each project to perfectly match the job. “Plus I really like to absorb the client and really get into their mind,” says Gabbay. “I also really have an appreciation for the agency’s unique quagmire in producing work. That makes Humunculus unique. We’re not just doing it for ourselves.”

For the Toyota spot, Gabbay brought on producer Allessandra Pasquino, a producer for Oliver Stone films and art-media exhibits including the renowned “ashes and snow” nomadic exhibit; lead Maya artist Christian Perez, who has worked on three other car spots with Gabbay (including Infiniti); lead illustrator Max Keane, a cell animator well-versed with Maya animation; After Effects editor Lauren Mayer-Beug; artist William Thinnes, formerly a clean-up artist for Disney; and assistant Maya artist, Alex Solokoff. The team also included two clean-up artists and two storyboard artists.

The Humunculus team, directed by Gabbay, produced this regionally targeted 60-second, high-definition animated spot in 9 weeks.

Producing an Out of this World Spot
Because the cars in the spot are just a hair outside of being realistic vehicle replications, Humunculus wanted to make the whole spot a bit outside of reality as well. “There are already some rigs in Maya so that when you roll a car over a surface, it spins the wheels for you,” explains Gabbay. “But on others we had to do it ourselves,” he says. “Like, if the car was standing still, but the ground was moving.”

For example, at one point, Keane decided to draw a giant, nature and terrain covered treadmill for the commercial, which would rotate while the car remained still within the viewer's frame. “So then Christian started building the treadmill," explains Gabbay. “He is a fanatic about making something make physical sense, so he took all of Max's springs, connection rods and all, and made it all physically work. After that, he had to hand animate the car’s dynamics because the car was still not moving forward in space. It was super nuts. The client wasn’t sure they would like it, but they ended up loving it.”

Technical Challenges Overcome by Good Planning
When mapping out the workflow for this project, one challenge was to figure out how to build the frames and planes so that if the client had changes, Humunculus could update the animations without having to rework the entire project. In once instance, Maya artist, Perez, developed a shader that allowed them to dial up the torso transparency of each illustrated character individually, which was a major concern for the client.

Traditional cell animation stations with light tables were set up for this project. “We would shoot it on the light stand with stills, then pin reg them and convert them into line art using Illustrator,” explains Gabbay. “The Illustrator layers would then get rendered out as IFF sequences in After Effects and mapped onto polygons in Maya. The texture maps were huge, to accommodate close-ups in Hi-Def.”

Besides using After Effects for their final composites and time warping, the Humunculus team also used Shake to do some transitions between different cars and objects in the spot. “There's a part where a girl is riding a bike and she has a shadow on her from the light of the Prias, but doesn't have a shadow from the light of the Camry and there is a pretty significant color shift there," says Gabbay. “So Christian was able to do all of those colors and transitions in Shake 4.”

On top of the traditional set of G5’s, Quads and Minis, Humunculus recently started using G-Raid drives by G-Tech. “The G-Raid drives give you 30% faster reads and they are more reliable than anything we’ve used before,” says Gabbay.

Tech, Renders and Final Color
When it comes to rendering, Gabbay opts for as quiet of an office with as little IT as possible. “So we farm out to two different render farms: Render Rocket in LA and Res Power in Oklahoma,” he says. “It’s kind of fun watching 790 CPUs crunch through your project while you’re at lunch.”

All renders were done in 1080-24p HDTV and Humunculus took the rendered frames to RIOT in Santa Monica for final layoff, setting up an AT&T Satellite link for Saatchi so they could approve final color.

Working Together with Saatchi NY
The distance between Saatchi NY headquarters and Humunculus’ Venice base didn’t cause any problems working together, because the entire project was pretty much done by post. “Working remotely seems to be the norm these days,” says Gabbay.

“We were out on the West Coast for a month of shooting live action stuff,” says Janet of Saatchi NY. “So we got to spend an entire day with Saam going over creative issues. He was enthusiastic from the day we first called him.”

Ultimately, it was the collaborative nature of the project that made it so successful. “Humunculus created a very unique look within the parameters of what we and our clients needed,” says Leake. “There was a lot of back and forth discussion about every scene and every aspect of every scene. Sometimes we all agreed on what the right choice was, sometimes we didn’t. But the group dynamic helped achieve something we’re all really proud of.”