Vitra: Tip Ton Chair from Johnny Kelly on Vimeo.

Director Johnny Kelley exhibits the beauty of simplicity in his ingenious spot for the Vitra ‘Tip Ton’ Chair. This commercial, animated by Matthew Cooper, is a poem of playful absraction and pinpoint execution.


The cinematic dance is so powerful really because it is so utterly basic- like tangible visual music. Any artist that can invest the ephemeral into everyday functional objects is truly a ‘designer’- hence a well designed spot for a well designed chair.

Here Director Johnny Kelley gives an interview with Dragon, giving us a wealth of insight into his source inspirations and technical animation:

DSM: What are some of your art / film / design / general influences?
JK: For this project in particular I referenced Busby Berkely. Another influence was traditional product design photography – whenever a new chair, lamp or design object etc is released they are invariably photographed against an off-white infinity cove. I thought it would be interesting to make the film in this style, except in this case the product is moving. Generally, my work tends to reflect my background as a graphic designer, and I still love the work of people like GTF [http://www.graphicthoughtfacility.com/], MM [ http://www.mmparis.com ] and others. My partner is a product/interior designer so i’m fascinated by that world too, and had been a Barber Osgerby (British design studio who were commissioned to design the Tip Ton chair by Vitra) fanboy for many years. 

DSM: How did Dragon help in the project?
JK: We had quite a short shoot, so I wanted to prepare as much as possible. I created a 3D animatic that we used as an animation guide, using the line up layer function. Because the chairs were actual size rather than scale models it would have been a bit of a headache trying to arrange 20 of them in, say, a spiral formation, so being able to use the line-up layer in Dragon saved a lot of time. So much time in fact, that it was the only shoot I’ve worked on where we didn’t go into overtime! Many of the setups only required capturing 10 or 12 frames – enough for example that a spinning chair could loop – and then we could move onto the next shot.

Because we knew we were going to be using the line-up layer to such an extent, I borrowed a friend’s projector before the shoot, and we were able to have a 15 foot high projection of the Dragon display..! This made it much easier for the animators to be able to see what they were doing. The drawback was that it wasn’t terribly exciting for them because pretty much everything had been decided at animatic stage, but there was a lot of problem solving to try and physically replicate the shots. Its easy to make a chair pirouette in Maya, a little tricker in real life.

DSM: Can you share some technical information – camera, computer, general process, etc:
JK: We shot on two Canon 5D MKII cameras; one was positioned to the front and another positioned directly above, so we could capture two angles of the same animation. We had two Mac Pro / Dragon setups too, which meant that we could shoot twice the amount of footage per scene.

Pete Ellmore, who was the DP on the project, invariably positioned the camera quite far away and used long lenses (eg 85mm) in order to create the flat, almost isometric, aesthetic we were looking for. The designers of the chair were often on set, and were careful to make sure that we avoided any distortion that could have arisen out of using wider angle lenses. Because it was effectively one long product shot, they were understandably particular about how their chair was lit and photographed. One of the tricker aspects was creating even lighting over such a wide area, by using space lights we were able to create a soft overall top-down light. We were capturing RAW at full resolution, with the idea that any frame of animation could also act as a publicity shot for the chair, and its been exciting to see them featured in Wallpaper* and other magazines.

-Johnny Kelly

….exemplifies the simplicity of style.