Cricket Wireless/WWE 5G Campaign
Our animation studio (Threadwood) built, lit, and animated three separate stop motion sequences for a Cricket/WWE campaign. We’ve always admired the CG animation in Cricket ads, so it was a pleasure for us to contribute some stop motion!
Produced by BUCK
Directed by Dan Marsh
Cricket Puppets by Rachel D. Mark
VFX by Ben Rohel & Eva Flodstrom
Here's a little overview of our lighting/camera setup. We used a motion control rig and the lights were individually controllable from DragonFrame.
The hazy look on the lights was achieved by stretching chiffon around the perimeter of the wrestling ring. This was a new idea for us, and it worked pretty well!
Here's Alexis steaming away some wrinkles before shooting. The chiffon technique worked, but it was a pain!
The only modification we made to the toys was adding rig points and tie downs for the feet.
Rigging equipment was purchased from Kinetic Armatures.
The Cricket characters were expertly made off-site by Rachel D. Mark and her team.
This part was pretty tricky...as you can see, the wrestler is wired so that we could add lights to his pen cap rocket boosters. Additionally, we had two flashlights set up to add the orange glow to the cotton "smoke" coming out of the boosters.
Lots of "smoke" effects in these ads! Alexis prepped these shapes for me. She's really good at shaping cotton balls, which is a lot harder than you think!