PSYOP / TURNS 10

   
2000: AT&T Campaign
Kylie Matulick, founder/director: This was one of the hardest design exercises I have ever done. Dealing with perfect circles and abstract shapes, the limited palette, and then making everything move and connect to build a playful narrative was a challenge - so much thought and care had to go into those shapes and forms and to control the compositions. The most successful part, and the biggest discovery for us, was the sense of seamless animation and transitions - the realisation that was the journey, the narrative. It created a whimsy that no one really expected, and it became a PSYOP trademark, which is still prevalent in much of our work.

2001: VH1 'My Music Awards'
Marco Spier, founder/director: This was the first time we applied a couple of techniques which became trademarks for the next several years. Firstly 'toon' shading, a type of non-photorealistic rendering designed to make CG animation appear to be hand drawn which we had been playing around with while at MTV doing R&D. Until then most CG was very plastic looking. Second we used 'ghetto' capture - the Lower East Side version of motion capture, which was being used by expensive VFX studios to animate characters in a human way. We videoed ourselves doing all the characters' motions and then used that to hand animate to. Third, we combined these techniques to create a world of little animated people, a style which we became known for, and almost pigeon-holed into, and that became a huge trend in commercials.

2002: Lugz 'Arrow'
Spier: We did a great music video a couple of years before for Company Flow, in which animated 3D graffiti takes over the New York subway. We revisited this idea with Lugz and really pushed the illustration line art as well as the dirty 'urban' gritty paper stuff. It was one of the first spots in the street graffiti genre, became big in the hip-hop community, where Lugz was known, and spawned several imitations and a national controversy, featured in The New York Times, over where the idea for a very similar looking iPod commercial featuring Eminem came from - it was great for Lugz, and gave the spot a second life.'

2003: Bombay 'Drift'
Matulick: Bombay was one of the first truly open briefs we had. The agency sent over a bottle of Bombay gin with our name on it and a few words about the brand and its values - that was it! Our idea was to create a visual poem. A graphic, animated narrative, with a Disney-like, fairytale quality, but with sophisticated design. I think what really works is the transitioning from different perspectives in a seamless and subtle way making the piece so easy and dreamy to watch, really drawing people into the story and the brand.

2004: Fox Sports 'Nascar'
Marie Hyon, founder/director: This was also a very open brief, an opportunity do something different from the usual Nascar promos. We hit upon the idea of the graphic novel platform, which has been used for years in print to tell dramatic stories of super-heroic endeavors, and in animation offered us an interesting way of telling the action packed story of man and machine that is Nascar. For me the blend of design, animation and storytelling really works.

2005: MTV 'Crow'
Hyon: 'Crow' was a purely a right side of the brain experience. MTV gave us complete freedom to create an HD experience with music in mind, and Marco and I drew upon imagery of our travels and memories while listening to a Beethoven track and hit upon flocks of bird and a birch forest merging and unfolding with the score of the music. We built upon our 'signature' seamless transitions with this visual journey and abstract imagery, and really understood how powerful and surprising they could be.

2006: Coke 'Happiness Factory'
Justin Booth-Clibborn, managing partner: This is probably the spot we are most recognised for, and funnily enough one of the shortest pitches we ever did - it was 4 days I think, from getting the brief to flying to Amsterdam for the kick off meeting.
Todd Mueller, founder/director: From the core idea of what really happens inside a Coke vending machine, how does all that happiness get into a bottle of Coke? We came up the most absurd celebration of a product that we could possibly imagine. Wieden + Kennedy said it wanted fantastical fantasy, so we thought, 'Ok, we'll give you fantasy, and then some!' We just went for it, and I think no one thought about it as a big spot so it went under the radar, and we were able to do our thing, and really push the ideas. It was so completely unexpected and different.
Booth-Clibborn: It is the most successful Coke spot ever, in terms of test results. Happiness Factory 2, the 5 minute short film we made a year later, has been watched online an estimated 100 million times, and we have just finished animation for the immersive Happiness Factory experience at the World's Fair in Shanghai this year.

2007: Fanta 'Play' campaign
Spier: This was a very personal project for me. The brief was all about 'play', so I went back to my childhood and thought about my all time favorite things to play with - like many people it was little characters with personalities that I gave them. 'Playing' with that idea and aging it up, we gave all the characters very strong personalities, mostly inspired by the people around us, and each one has a deep back story, so we are best friends with all of our Fanta characters! We're currently working on round two, developing the characters and their world even further, and telling more fun little stories around the universal theme of Play.

2008: adidas 'Together' campaign
Spier: From the start the agency made it clear to us that this was so much more than just a series of commercials. They were really trying to capture the mood and pride of the whole country. No pressure! The idea of a collective effort is much more embedded in Chinese culture than in the west, and it was important to have the people actively involved in the achievement of the individual athletes. We were inspired by the Chinese approach to storytelling. Like the written language, their storytelling is more oriented around images, than ours is, and for us as visual people, this was very inspiring.
Booth-Clibborn: This was a very significant project for PSYOP. It was the biggest campaign for the Beijing Olympics, the biggest single campaign ever for adidas, and the design went on the win the first ever Gold Lion at Cannes for China, for the print piece. It really put us on the map in China.

2009: Haagen Dazs 'Save the Bees'
Laurent Ledru, partner/director: I am the newest creative partner so I am coming in at the end, but this is my favorite project I worked on so far at PSYOP, partly because of the way it happened. We had the idea of making an opera about the last Bee and the last Flower on earth, and pushing the whole design towards an operatic style. The LA studio was not open yet, so I was working on the designs at home, when I got word that the job was killed, and the client didn't want to spend the money. As we were so nearly done, we sent the style frames anyway, and they decided to go ahead on the strength of the designs we presented. After that we had a good amount of creative freedom and I am pretty pleased with the outcome.

2010: Michelin campaign
Spier: Growing up in Germany, the Michelin Man was much more of an icon than he is here. I actually had one mounted on my truck! So it is great having a chance to create and invent a whole world around him, a land in which he can live, with all his friends, the cars, the animals, everything. We love creating worlds like this. We're in the middle of this project, but we have completed two spots so far and it is one of the most fun projects I have ever been a part of here. The whole team is excited to be working on such cool stuff. The stories are great, the style is fun, and everybody is contributing a lot of great ideas at every stage of the production. It's the PSYOP way.

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