British Animation Award winner for Aardman

Aardman Animation's recent Tennets commercial last month won the coveted British Animation Award for audiences favourite commercial. The latest commercial is soon to be released and the story is that in the world of Tennents lager giant humans are murdering pints of beer. An empty pint of beer was found lying in a gutter and our characters are detectives hell bent on catching the culprits. The latest commercial starts in a police room where they are discussing how to catch the murderers using one of the pints as a decoy. The backup is provided by police wearing "special body armour suits". The suits are in fact The Tennents tins. We cut to a forest where naturally humans turn up and all hell breaks loose. For both commercials we shot the live action entirely on the Milo.

To shoot the commercials professional puppeteers were puppeteering a real pint of beer on sticks within the model sets. Three Perception Digital Video Recorders (PVRs) were used for the live action shoot. One for video assist, one for sound playback and one to record a second (usually overhead) viewpoint using a budget video camera. All towers were triggered from the Milo so that the first frame on film was guaranteed to be in the correct place. This was vital for the puppeteer to create the right "performance" for the pint of beer with the dialogue and sound effects and of course to get the lip synch perfect. The PVR video assist was triggered so that the first frame on film was the first frame on video. The animators then used this footage as a background to animate lips, arms and legs for the pints of beer. (Being pints of beer they obviously don't have any eyes!)
The animators stepped the live action video assist information forward a frame at a time and lined up a green "pint" to the real pint of beer from the live action. The green pint was merely an armature for the animated mouth arms and legs, the top and bottom of which had to fit exactly to the live action pint. An offline cut was done in one of Aardmans Avid suites as the animation progressed and the director was able to tweak the commercial as each new animation pass was added. Since the PVR was synched to the film camera it was known exactly which frame on the video assist related to each frame on the negative. And so when a frame count came from Avid to start animating to there was never any worry about having the background correct. The overhead video camera gave the animators a hand in showing which way the pint was leaning which was not always obvious from the front. Post production was done in one of BBC Bristol's suites and the animation was placed on the live action and the result was walking, talking (and often dying) pints of beer.

The photo below shows a shot from the Award Winning Commercial. To view the full commercial go to http://www.aardman.com/trade/new/tennents.html .