New York - FlickerLab, a New York-based design and animation studio, has created a pair of line-drawn, animated commercials for Frangelico, the premium hazelnut liqueur, and its distributor Osborne (Spain). Conceived by agency TBWA\Madrid, the two branding spots -- the 30-second “Comida empresa†and the 10-second “Con Frangelico, nunca se sabe†-- began airing throughout Spain, on television and on the Internet, in mid-December.
The unique monk-shaped packaging of Frangelico liquor reflects its monastic legend and 300-year old recipe. The bottle sports a cord around its middle which comes to life to write the story of a new employee who goes out to a company dinner, falls in love, and dances the night away with a beautiful women who, it turns out, is his boss. The story is drawn with one continuous, moving line -- a cord that has neither a beginning nor an end.
“To achieve the effect we were after we decided to give the spots a handcrafted flair. We planned very carefully which, of course, is one of the great reasons to work with FlickerLab,†explains director Joel Marsden of BUS Animation (Madrid), which represents FlickerLab for commercial work in Spain and is a division of the commercial production company BUS. “We began with numerous pre-tests to create the handmade look that sold the agency on the execution. Designers shaped the look. Flash animators created the basis of the movement. Stop motion animators embellished that look with the cord, and lastly, compositors brought it all together adding shadows and backgrounds. The FlickerLab team brings all the talent, all the facets, to the table -- the designers, line animators, stop motion folks and compositors. In the end, the elegant simplicity, and the flow of the lines, makes these commercials absolutely beautiful.â€
Harold Moss, founder/creative director of FlickerLab, added, “The idea was to create something that felt like it could have been unearthed from an archive of ’50s Polish stop motion animation, that had a genuine organic feel. However, the complexity of the animation required that we use a sophisticated digital pipeline combined with many days of traditional stop motion animation to achieve the look. The spot looks simple, clean, and like an artifact but the complexity is such that it really required a very modern process to bring the animation to life. We pre-visualized everything, shot hi-res digital still images, and used Flash animation and computer-assisted stop motion. The same concept was employed to animate the tag line, ‘with Frangelico you never know,’ for the 10-second spot.â€
The FlickerLab creative team, led by Moss, included senior producer Melissa Johnson; animation director Peter Wallach; designers Zartosht Soltani and Max Porter; 2D animators/storyboard artists Phil Lockerby and Nikolay Nachev; After Effects artist Kat Llewellyn; producer Franklin Zitter; and stop-motion animators Jeremy Bronson and Matthew Amonson.
FlickerLab utilized Adobe After Effects, Photoshop, Flash, and Dreamweaver; Panic Transmit; PowerMac G5 computers; iMac Intel computers; Apple display 20-inch monitors; Dell Ultrasharp 24-inch wide-screen displays; Wacom Intuos 3 and Cintiq tablets; and Nikon D70 camera in the execution of package.
Representing the Spanish production company BUS Pro (Madrid Spain) were director Joel Marsden and producer Claudia Mayer.
TBWA\Madrid’s creative team included creative directors Jose Antonio Bosch and Chano Coronil; creative team Peru Saiz and Jorge Pezzi; account supervisor Javier GarcÃa; account manager Claudia Pou; production director Enrique Doménech; and producer Mónica Marcos.
Osborne, the distributor of Frangelico, was represented by Yago Mellado, Iñigo Aberasturi, and Melisa Kindelan.
The musical underscore and sound design were created by David Wilson of David Wilson Audio (New York).
