Murphy's "Peanuts"
A humorous ad that put some fun into the beer’s battle, with many little things hidden this is one of those ads you will see a hundred times and something new will appear.
Mar 11, 2002
1 min read
Director: Jorn Haagen
Agency: BBH
Production: Thomas Thomas
Client: Murphy's
My first real project in charge of animation, rigging and directing the motion capture session with the great team at The Mill.
Approach
We choreographed the action by filming 20 real actors and timing it to perfection so we later could do an empty pass that would be the master plate to be utilised. This allowed everyone to sign off on the action, and our critical factor was to motion capture those same actions one by one in the motion capture studio. For this, we mapped it all out on the floor, and we had the same exact bar (without the furniture), so the actors and I had a proper visual reference of the space.
The challenge was to synchronise 20 skeletons in a bar, all motion captured and then enhanced by hand, from floating bones to a realistic spine, breathing and much more to enhance the action. For this, I built a sophisticated skeleton rig that was mechanically aware of the limits of the joints and even deformed the rib cage as if there were muscles colliding.
All contact between the skeletons and objects or other skeletons was hand animated and mixing techniques using the amazing XSI Mixer toolset, so we could eliminate signatures of those few actors, as in the mocap studio, we only had four, and their walk patterns would arise otherwise. Basically, I didn't want all of them to look like that one actor, so some time went into the clean-up process.
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