Charlex's long road to shorts: keeping it photoreal with animation for spots and a new short film

Post, July, 2004 by Ken McGorry

NEW YORK -- "Animation is the biggest untold story in New York," Pat Swinney Kaufman, executive director of the Governor's Office for Motion Picture and Television Development, told Post recently. Now Charlex, with its burgeoning animation division here on West 45th Street, is out to prove Kaufman right with its own story. With its mandate to "design and build digital communication," the venerable company, headed by executive creative director Alex Weil, has specialized over the years in posting clever, design-centric commercial campaigns for numerous Fortune 100 clients. Over the past three years, Charlex (www.charlex.com) has been steadily building an Alias Maya-based animation division capable of delivering increasingly sophisticated animation for commercials and more. Proof of their success came recently when Charlex won a Gold Award in the videogame trailer category at the Promax/BDA conference, held here, for their opening cinematic for Rock Star Games' Midnight Club II. And now Charlex is cooking up something unexpected: a short animated film.

RATZ

The short, currently called Labratz, already boasts a rich-looking finished teaser while the Charlex team, under the direction of VP/CG supervisor Bryan Godwin, works on the planned 15-minute version. Aimed at the festival circuit, Labratz is set in a moody, Lower-Manhattan-style cityscape populated by, yes, some rats. Godwin joined Charlex about three years ago with the launch of the animation division. Godwin, who recently was promoted to VP, came from Blue Sky in White Plains, NY, where he had been a lighting/compositing TD on Ice Age. He now has a 22-person division running Maya software and Mental Ray on Windows 2000 computers.

Godwin brought to bear his Blue Sky "assembly line" workflow experience on the relatively longform Labratz as well as on Charlex's many commercial projects. "It tends to be very efficient," he says, adding that it's easy to stop and tweak client changes.

One denizen of Labratz displays particularly good emoting skills while remaining on all fours and eschewing a humanoid wardrobe. This rat, known as Cagney, was conceived by Weil and designed by Michael Frith, the veteran Muppets designer and Henson TV program producer who works with Charlex on a consulting basis.

Cagney's performance points to one of Weil's central beliefs: you can get more impact when animating a character by keeping it photoreal than you might by anthropomorphizing or going the exaggerated squash-and-stretch route. Imparting character to animals or inanimate objects "goes back to the beginning of time," says Frith, adding, "there's more and more happening now with 3D animation. When you get into that 3D world, you're really tapping into something atavistic that goes back to our deepest roots." Although Cagney looks realistic, he comes across as possessed of more intelligence and more attitude. As Frith says, "he's a raffish rat with a streak of humanity." Frith points out that Godwin's team, which includes the recent addition of Blue Sky alum Ross Scroble as senior animator, brought live lab rats into the Charlex offices for close study of their movements and behavior.

NOTHING TO SNEEZE AT

Cagney the rat is a subtle, realistic and convincing actor yet so are the many inanimate products animated for Charlex clients: a family of Cingular Wireless phones (and the humanoid Cingular "jack" icon); the bottled juice drink SunnyD; AOL's "Running Man" icon (promoting AOL 9.0 in a clever action-movie send up); Cremesavers (candies that shed their wrappers and dance); a sea of colorful M & M's undulating to music; and Allegra's Ragweed and Pollen characters.

But does the market today want more talking animations? That need has not really changed, says Weil, but the technology very much has. "Using CG, you can turn anything into a character," Weil says, "You can animate a kitchen table now and there's lots of work like that; logos become characters; our recent work for M & Ms is product animation that's organic and artistic."

Though they're a pair of talking allergens, Ragweed and Pollen in Allegra's ongoing campaign (produced by RSA) lean more toward the literal expressiveness of Labratz than Charlex's non-anthropomorphic animated products. Ragweed and Pollen were originally conceived by McCann-Erickson CDs Jan Rehder and Frank Fleizach, and Weil again worked with Frith, who says he kept other, classic comedic duos in mind such as Laurel and Hardy when designing these two. TV viewers have seen the pair plotting their next conquest of an allergy sufferer, exuding ill will along with particulate pollen, dust, mold and spores. But how do you give them character? "Talking pollen? There's almost nothing on the planet that you can't give life to," says Frith, "it's great, great fun."

While the Cingular "family" of animated phones has funny dialogue, a Cingular spot called Bandshell shows one of the wireless phones at its best. Working with BBDO to depict Cingular's ability to transmit sound and pictures from a rock concert, Charlex set up the Katy Rose Band, playing via greenscreen, atop a giant-size CG replica of a wireless phone that acts both as the band's stage and video screen (running images of their performance onscreen).