Offering a brilliant mix of clever copywriting and seamless visual effects, the team at Click 3X gave voice to a group of chatty chickens that curiously, would rather be French fries. The studio was tapped by Crispin Porter + Bogusky and Burger King® (Spain) to create a series of talking chickens for two spots, "Outcast" and "Friends" which were produced in English with :30 and :15 versions and Spanish with :20 and :10 variations. The spots made their debut in the United States on July 31 and August 14 respectively.
"We’ve all seen talking animal spots before," notes Click 3X executive producer and partner, Jason Mayo, "but these spots offer a new twist on the genre. I knew these spots would be successful as soon as we completed the first Spanish spot and people who don’t speak a word of Spanish were laughing. This is a perfect example of the distinctive work that CP+B is known for and we’re proud to have collaborated on it."
Working with live action shot by director Matt Lenski, Click 3X’s visual effects artists combined some tried and true techniques with state of the art CG image manipulation to create the desired effect. Lenski shot the chickens on highly detailed miniature sets, which were custom built for the assignment. With each chicken’s performances captured independently, the effects team had to composite all of the fowl for each scene in which more than one shared the frame. Led by visual effects supervisor Marc Szumski, the greater challenge lay in creating stylized, yet believable talking movements for the chickens. Szumski and flame artists Aaron Vasquez and Kevin Quinlan first digitally erased the lower portions of each chicken beak including the wattles (the dangling fleshy areas that appear jowl-like) and then painstakingly replaced them with computer generated equivalents constructed in Flame. The beaks were then manipulated by hand in time to the chicken’s dialog as recorded by voice over artists.
"Creating a realistic talking chicken is fairly complex," explained Szumski, "We discovered that if you try to animate the beak so it actually matches the phonemes of the dialog it looks wrong, particularly in the Spanish versions where the dialog is spoken quite rapidly. So, we developed a technique that uses the major phonemes as key points and built subtleties around those. I think the technique was successful."
This project marks the sixth in a series of collaborations between Lenski and the team at Click 3X. Prior to this campaign, the most recent effort had been a music video for the chart-topping British group, Zero 7. The video was constructed entirely from digital stills shot by Lenski and visual effects magic provided by the artists at Click 3X.
Related Links: www.click3x.com
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