Animation makes it into the mainstream

“Now it has become an industry in its own right,” says Craig Wessels, of Wicked Pixels, a Cape Town-based production company that specialises in producing high-impact commercials for leading advertising agencies around the world. The company also produces on-air imaging for leading broadcasters. Clients include HBO, MTV, DSTV, SABC and e.tv.

“Whatever work we do, it's almost always for broadcast,” says Wessels.

TV here in SA works on 25 frames per second, and he likened a single frame to a poster, but of equal importance to the frames before, and those after.

He pointed out that at a rate of 25 frames per second, that works out at 750 frames for a 30-second advertisement.

“The movement that they create means that there is a journey, from beginning to end… so it means telling a story from A to Z,” he says.

He makes the point that nothing happens in a vacuum, so producing a commercial such as the MTN stickies, is very much a collaborative effort. “You can't create good work without a team,” he asserts.

With regard to the MTN stickies commercial, it meant using the stop-frame technique - which entails taking one shot, then moving the subject slightly, taking the next shot, and so on.

It's laborious… the process took five days up in Johannesburg and was shot on 35mm and a still camera.

The figure also grew… from about 100 stickies to more than 7,000!

“We also had a stickie girl, and planned a romance, but it didn't work out. Sorry, girls,” he adds.

He says the team actually took the shots and edited them, and only then built the story line - and three hours of footage was the raw material… of which two hours and 59 minutes worth ended up on the floor.

“To make some of the scenes more dynamic, we mounted some of the cameras on movable mounts,” says Wessels. The night shots were taken between 11pm and 4am.

One thing he stresses it that it's all in the detail…

“Every stickie was given its own character… curl, flap, angle or whatever,” he says.

“We chose to mimic reality.”

The result was the 60 second MTN stickies commercial.

To see more, go to Wicked Pixels