Nickelodeon chops into teen demographic Joanna Witt
ROBOTIC spiders, futuristic motorbikes and karate-kicking kids leap across the screen in a 30-second creative to promote Nickelodeon’s new children’s schedule.
The ad promotes the channel’s two-hour weekend spot called Slam!, which targets teenagers through programs such as Jackie Chan Adventures. The ad shows a young girl and boy transformed into leather-clad adventurers, who use high-flying karate kicks to defeat enormous evil spiders, then jump into gold aerodynamic motorbikes and speed around the futuristic landscape. The images are set to a pumping soundtrack composed by Wicked Sound System.
Nickelodeon’s creative director Kristie Phelan says the channel came up with a general idea and worked with Inkproject’s Ken Lambert to create the visuals. “I wanted the packaging to make kids the heroes,” she says.
From a fairly open brief, Phelan and Lambert had a brainstorming session, with Lambert sketching out ideas.
“We try and do non-sexist and non-violent programming,” says Phelan, “but we thought karate was controlled, so that worked.”
Lambert says the first stage was storyboard-style frames.
“When we started we didn’t know what programs Nick would be buying so we took our inspiration from generic programmes like Tron and War of the Worlds to create a hybrid sequence.”
Lambert says one of the main challenges was the budget. “We wanted it to look like a million dollars, but didn’t have a million dollars, so we designed all the post-production beforehand.
“We wanted a mix of media with graphics and special effects and that made the process relatively painless.
“We used simple effects and repeated them over and over allowing us to do a 30-second segment as opposed to a five-second one. The end result looks complex but is relatively simple.”
The team started with illustrations. “We spent three or four days sketching and doing illustration packages to design the bikes and spider and then the animator took over,” says Lambert. “The sketches were helpful and the basics were putting marks on paper, it was as simple as that.”
Omnilab Post’s 3D team supported Lambert and 314 renders were sent off in the final week amounting to almost 10,000 frames of 3D elements alone.
The team used Maya on NT and Win2000 workstations, along with Shake and Inferno. Chris Spry says Maya’s character nodes and trax editors proved invaluable.
“Once I’d set up a hero spider with the controls needed for animating and an interactive low-resolution version of the model, Maya’s character node made it a breeze to duplicate the many spiders needed while retaining the variation in animation.”
Credits: Director/designer: Ken Lambert, post-production Omnilab Post, compositor Rosano Lepri, post-production producer George Mackenzie, creative director Nickelodeon Australia Kristie Phelan, Omnilab 3D Richard Geluk, Joshua Czikowski, Chris Spry.
