Blind Mixes Pain and Pleasure

What if your favorite Saturday morning cartoons went very, very wrong?

Blind paired up with Goodby, Silverstein & Partners agency and Specialized Bikes to find out. The 60 second animated spot sends a cute, unsuspecting bike rider down the wrong trail. Despite his run-in along the way with a bear (and a school of piranhas, and a hungry bird, and some Girl Scouts of questionable moral character), the little guy has a blast on his Specialized Stumpjumper bike, all the way up until the explosive ending.

“It was the project we just couldn’t refuse,” said Blind creative director Tom Koh. ‘€œAs the animation was part of an online campaign, Goodby Silverstein gave us a lot of creative freedom to explore the concept of this ride gone horribly wrong.”

Key to the effectiveness of the piece is the element of surprise from an unexpected turn for the gory. To achieve that contrast, Koh and his team worked to create a world drawn from an innocent children’s cartoon. “We wanted it to look as though this could have been pulled from a Saturday morning animation archive”explained Koh.

Working in pen and pencil, the creative team designed a charming, but dangerous, cast of characters to inhabit the ill-fated trail: our broad smiling mountain biker, a fuzzy, long-clawed bear, bunnies (with Molotov cocktails), birds, those Girl Scouts, and even a Sasquatch with a spork. To maintain the Saturday-morning feel, Blind used traditional cell-animation for the majority of the characters. Additional motion, such as the fire, was done with 3D applications Studio Max and Maya.

The final result is a shocking, humorous, and memorable short film that shows the fun of a ride on a Specialized bike. “Goodby Silverstein was a pleasure to work with,” said Koh. “It was a challenge is finding the right balance of gore and innocence to get that powerful surprise. But they gave us the creative freedom to take it as far as it needed to go, even encouraging more gore, more shock. It was an absolute pleasure to work in such a tight creative dynamic.”

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