Brushing your teeth doesn’st have to be a dull experience. In a new spot, Hasbro introduces Tooth Tunes, a groundbreaking musical toothbrush for kids. Motion design and production collective Lightborne was tapped by ad agency WonderGroup to create the ambitious CG and animation in the spot, which features KISS’s ‘Rock and Roll All Nite.’

The eye-catching spot, ‘Revolution,’ features a totalitarian Orwellian world where we see hundreds of kids mundanely brushing their teeth as an oppressive “Big Brother battle-ax” keeps time from a projection screen. In an act of rebellion, a heroic boy appears, holding up the new Tooth Tunes brush. As he turns it on, a sound wave appears from the brush and transforms the old environment into a state-of-the-art concert arena trimmed with an animated rave display as we hear, ‘Rock and Roll All Nite.’ Released from bondage, the kids go wild with excitement as they brush and rock out to KISS in front of high-tech projection screens displaying colorful graphics.

‘When the boards came in I felt that this project was a perfect match for us,’ explains Scott Durban, Lightborne Executive Producer. ‘It needed live-action direction coupled with design and visual effects.’

With the help of Lightborne VFX Supervisor David Lombardi, a pre-visualization animatic of the entire spot was created in CG before the shoot. This allowed Lightborne Live-Action Director Scott Fredette to precisely plan out the camera moves and to determine how to shoot the HD greenscreen plates, which greatly improved production planning. Twenty kids were shot against greenscreen and were cleverly duplicated to make up the hundreds seen in the spot.

“This commercial was a launch of the Tooth Tunes tooth brush and expectations were high,” says Fredette. ‘Thankfully, we were given a really solid idea from the creative team at WonderGroup. This commercial had to look cool, as well as show the technology of the toothbrush. It was wonderful to do a pre-visualization beforehand so we knew how the spot would flow and what angles looked the best. David’s help in the pre-visualization process made our shot list so much more manageable and allowed us to concentrate on the performances of our 20 kids which, incidentally, we cloned into 500.’

Lightborne Designer Tuesday McGowan handled the design work on the innovative demo portion of the spot, and the screen animations, as well as helping to art-direct the sketches from the production designer for the CG environments.

After the shoot, Lightborne Editor Jeremiah Shuff and Fredette worked with the HD footage in Final Cut to create a meticulous cut with placeholder elements for the backgrounds.

Lombardi created both the CG Orwellian world and the dance environment using Lightwave, and gave special attention to texture and lighting.

‘The freedom of building these virtual environments gave us creative flexibility in designing each shot,’ explains Lombardi. ‘Once the photo-real CG environments were built, we focused on duplicating the kids and general compositing in Digital Fusion. Even the compositing was a virtual 3D space, which meant all of the duplicated kids could be manipulated in the composite in relation to the 3D rooms.’

Lightborne Compositor Dave Irion was responsible for creating signature motion graphics for the projection screens in After Effects for the spot’s finishing touch.

To view the ‘Revolution’ spot, please click here!

Credits:
Client: Hasbro/Tiger Electronics
Spot Title/Airdate: ‘Revolution’ :30/October 23, 2006

Advertising Agency WonderGroup/Cincinnati OH Creative Director: Matt Fischer
Art Director: Charlie Padgett Copywriter: Ried Cartwright
Producer: Barry Zeidman

Production Company Lightborne/Cincinnati, OH Director: Lightborne
DP: Romeo Tirone
Executive Producer: Scott Durban
Producer: Jane Lester
Where shot: Midwest Studios/Cincinnati, OH

Editorial Company: Lightborne/Cincinnati, OH
Editor: Lightborne
Assistant Editor: Brad Trimble
Postproduction & VFX Company: Lightborne/Cincinnati, OH

Music: ‘Rock and Roll All Nite’ by KISS

Sound Design & Audio Post Company: Sonic Arts/Cincinnati, OH
Sound Designers/Mixers: John McDaniel & Austin Gorrigan
Executive Producer: Amy Austin

Lightborne is located at 212 East Fourteenth Street, Cincinnati, OH 45202
Phone: 513.721.2272. Fax: 513.721.2310
www.light-borne.com