Controversial little swimmer
If you checked my links last week, you saw ths link to a new ad from Norwegian design studio Toxic. If you haven’t seen it yet, do so before you read on.
The ad looks like it is the official commercial for Europride, the Gay and Lesbian festival in Oslo, Norway from 17th to 27th of June, 2005.
But it never made it to the official arrangements at the festival, due to criticism in the Gay and Lesbian community. On the net it’s a different story: A huge success, with over 80 000 downloads and over 500 GB in downloads during this weekend.
Idea
The idea comes from advertising agency Kitchen in Oslo, which also have clients like McDonalds in Norway.
Technical details
The movie itself is made by Toxic design studio in Oslo. It is animated by talented 3D manager Rune Spaans, who made an animatic in 3ds Max first. 20-25 pics were put together with “temp” music, and discussed with Kitchen to see if the story and cut was right.
Version 1 of the animatic is here, and version 2 here.
Rune then had to download way too many pictures of sperm and Colonoscopy for research. At work! LOL.
He then made an advanced test in 3ds Max, which didn’t work out the way he wanted it too. Switching to Maya didn’t work out either. Back to 3ds Max again, this time with a simpler setup, which worked.
The passes were done with RPManager in 3ds Max, 16 bit greyscale.It was rendered in Brazil and composited in Digital Fusion. An almost finished version of the animation is here.
With several thousand sperms in some pictures, some of the frames took over five hours to render. The sperms have a glasslike surface that mimics jellyfish. The whole thing took over a week to render on Toxic’s render farm.
Music
The music is made by Verdens sterkeste mann (The World’s strongest man). Brilliant name for a company.
Rune has even made a director’s cut of the movie. I won’t tell you what the yellow thing is…
There’s also a technical explanation about the production here – in Norwegian.
Controversy
The movie got lots of criticism in the Gay and Lesbian community in Oslo. Many people thinks it encourages people to have sex without a condom. And thereby undermining the work with HIV and AIDS information. Other critics don’t like the fact the the Lesbians are forgotten in the ad. Which in turn made Europride turn down the movie, and not include it in the festival.
Read more about the controversy in Gay and Lesbian paper Blikk
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