Phony product shot from a recent sketch
Here’s a brief look at how I put together a commercial parody last week on the show.
The idea was for the “Mom Mom,” a GPS Navigator that’s just like the Tom Tom, but instead of just saying the directions, it says them like your mom used to. That is, the device nags you as you drive.
I thought it would be more fun if Jay was the driver being nagged, and on the day we went out to shoot it (it was about 15 minutes of Jay driving in the neighborhood around the studio), he wanted to make the device more than just a voice, but also to show a little white-haired old lady on the screen.
We shot Jay’s lines, then set up a shoot later in the afternoon of an old lady against a green screen background, so I could put her image over some electronic maps and at least make it seem like she belonged in the device.
I built some 3D models on the computer in a low-cost software called Hash Animation Master, and animated them to make the bit look more like a commercial. First, a computer-generated Tom Tom, and then the modified product with different touches that make it seem more homey.
Computer-generated GPS units in various stages of completion
Next, I made a 3-second animation in Hi Def of each of the models making one full revolution. That way, I could loop the video, spinning them as many times as I want and flying them around the screen in the compositing software, After Effects. That’s where I added the background and titles, mimicking the same type style and look of the Tom Tom Commercial.
Since we had no budget for the shoot, everything was handheld. I stabilized the footage in After Effects, then built a scrolling map background and dropped it onto the footage. I edited the whole thing together in Avid and showed it to the head writer.
We agreed that the old lady didn’t add much to the bit, but still wanted to comply with Jay’s wishes of having an old lady portray the Mom Mom. So I brought in a voiceover artist, the excellent Vanessa Marshall, to create a new Mom Mom voice, and started building a completely computer-generated old lady bust to become the computer personality of the parody.
I had my work cut out for me. I only had 24 hours to design, build, animate, output and color correct that character, and also have it look halfway decent. The model I built is a mix between Tweety Pie’s grandma and Norman Bates’ mom. I flattened out the skin on her face and used Photoshop to paint on makeup (blue eye shadow, red lipstick and rouge, and a little shadowing under the chin). Then I used the same hearts motif on her dress as on the outside of the GPS device, and started configuring the model for lip sync.
Tweety Pie’s Granny meets Max Headroom
The splines that define her mouth and chin each got a virtual “bone,” with rules defining how much different parts of her face moved with the movement of each bone. Using the new voiceover, I created the mouth movements first, then moved on to animate her head movement. I blinked her eyes and moved her eyebrows around to help with the acting, and got a pretty good effect in the time allotted. If I’d had another day, I would have been able to make the acting better, but I didn’t have time for that level of subtlety, and anyway, since she was on a screen-within-a-screen, I wanted her to stand out with her movements being a bit more exaggerated.
A test render of the lady with lighting
I changed the scrolling map background to something that looked computer-y, but was not so busy, then composited it all together again in After Effects and output to the Avid.
The art department’s practical version vs. the computer-generated model, all composited together
Here is a link to the final ad. Not the most hilarious parody in history, but it was fun to do a bit of a departure from the usual and the ABC joke at the end, though lost on the audience, was a fun way to end it.
