The other spot in the series:
Sinem Sakaoglu:
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When I read the concept for the McDonald’s “Made of Love” series, I was immediately excited at the opportunity to create a world within a world and combine stop motion with live action. We wanted to capture a sense of playfulness and handmade charm mixing reality and fantasy. I find it fascinating to have miniature characters come alive in the real world. And these spots gave us the opportunity to go at it in two different ways – one was more technically involved and faster, while the other one had more room for character animation and interaction with actors.
Once we dug into the script and storyboarding of course we realized what challenges lay ahead. Luckily, this team likes a challenge.
We had this one tricky camera move at the beginning of the MoL / Beef spot. The camera moves from the actress down to the counter following the tray and a farmyard starts folding out. I wanted this shot because through it we visually dive into the stop motion world while at the same time convincing the viewer from the get go that the animation is actually happening in the store (live action). This establishing shot also lends credibility to all the following shots. Getting the integration right at this moment was crucial for the whole spot. So here we were dealing with choreographed acting for the opening shot with a motion control system, matching light & field of view & depth of field for the live action and stop motion parts and scaling the whole move 2.5 times up since our stop motion world was built in a different scale to make it animatable. (Moco note: We used the TALOS in live action because it fit through the doors of the store where we were shooting and MILO for the stop motion part because we needed the reach/range (starting position 3.5m high))
The other thing about this long and tricky shot was that we only had one go at it while animating it. There was no room for error. We built the farmyard to the last position of the camera and animated backwards ripping the paper and folding and cutting buildings as we went along – basically destroying the whole set. There were a number of techniques used for the shot: folding, cutting, replacements, crumpling…Tobias Fouracre did a superb job at animating this shot. We planned certain things already in set building (replacements for trees and how they would animate for example), some we tested before shoot (the meadow rolling) and then it was a lot of improvising during shoot. I think that kept the process fun in a way and kept Tobias going for the whole 25 hours he spent animating the shot at one go.
For all the other shots, we built a special motorized rig for the tray so that we could match the changing light of the live action plates where we walk through the store.
We shot the live action parts with the Alexa and stop motion parts with Canon 5d with Zeiss lenses using Dragonframe.
We had two scales in both spots and so ended up building some very mini characters for some shots (the smallest character being a 1.5cm dog and the smallest prop being a mini banana of 4 mm tall).
Pretty much everything was built traditionally by hand. The hero puppets had ball & socket armatures, covered with paper. Some miniature and replacement puppets were only made out of paper. We also used 3d printing for the legs of the McDonald’s employees (I mean the puppets here- ha). All in all we 3d printed about 85 replacement legs for various walk cycles and jumps and bending action. The only other thing to be built with the help of computers was the 2.5 scale McDonald’s tray. We 3D scanned a real tray and blew it up then CNC milled it. It worked out pretty well for the integration.
For both spots we had a team of about 65 people (incl. live action team), shot 3 days of live action and 30 days of stop motion. Total production time was March – May including pre and post production.
Number of puppets built: 14 McDo employees, 18 cows (incl. mini cows), 2 dogs (incl. mini dog), 2 farmers (incl. 1 mini farmer) = 36 puppets including duplicates for Beef // 3 Lions (incl. 1 mini), 10 monkeys (inlc. 6 mini) = 13 puppets including duplicates for Books. A total of 49 puppets built.
Thanks, Sinem.
Making of- ‘Books’:
Making of- ‘Beef’:
Blog written by Vera Long