MAGS

The five spots, “Bumpin’ Beaver,” “Bali Blast,” “Bashin’ Benicio,” “Boogie Blender” and “Bank Burglar,” use characters inspired by both logos and club flyer artwork to show situations mixing music with gaming (M.A.G.S.’ raison d’etre). The boards from Grey conveyed the idea using simple line art on a bed of single colors, which Blind’s team, led by creative director and lead designer/animator Tom Koh, stylized in order to add context and flavor to the campaign.

“We started thinking about artwork that might seem fitting to the market we were trying to reach. After brainstorming, we realized a lot of club or rave flyer graphics were sophisticated in style but child-like in appearance,” says Koh. “They had given us roughs of ideas on their boards, so we redesigned all of the characters. We had started on the beaver spot, the original character. We wanted it to feel like an icon or logo and based it on geometric shapes.”

The beaver character set the tone for the campaign; from this point, the process of character design and animation proceeded in tandem. Working on a limited timeline of roughly 6 weeks, Koh and his team passed ideas back and forth, with the needs of the animation department influencing design as often as the design guided the animation.

“For much of the characters, I designed using Adobe Illustrator and we animated in After Effects. Generically speaking on each spot we’d take all the artwork created and design a whole shot list. After the shot list, we’d organize an entire sequence, and after laying our sequence, we’d go forth into animation,” says Koh.

Koh had previously experimented with such modular characters on a short film project, which helped streamline designing and animating characters quickly. 3D Plugins available for After Effects allowed animated camera moves within each spot and color correction was done with flame. Koh worked with one animator more versed in 3D and another more fluent in Flash animation, resulting in different perspectives as well as the creation of “Boogie Blender,” a more 2D take on the campaign’s idea. This spot comes across like a graphic representation of a recipe or instructional guide and less a humorous scenario.

Music and sound was handled by JSM, New York with tunes appropriate for each scenario; for example the blender spot reflects the visuals, referencing Mixmaster Mike or Qbert-esqe scratching, while “Bumpin’ Beaver” begins with more clubby beats that morph into Bill Withers-like vocals.

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