Wheel-o-trope

UK start-up carwow.co.uk has reinvented the wheel, turning the car buying experience on its head so car dealers compete for customers’ business. Of course that meant the company’s commercial had to reflect that innovation – it had to… wow.

Working with Guns or Knives, we reckon we’ve achieved that with a quirky, incredibly detailed animated piece based on old-school zoetrope animation.

We created a flat 2D ‘cyclotrope’, where sequential frames of an animation loop were arranged around a circle. The wheel was then spun to sync up with the camera’s shutter speed at 25 frames a second – the optimum speed for the human eye to perceive perfectly fluid animation. Try saying all that after one G&T too many!

Director Richard Chaney had this to say about the project:“Why do we never get the easy jobs? This was a great technical challenge as well as tickling our eternal obsession with all things animation. The world of old school zoetropes is just such a fun playground, so getting a script from Guns or Knives that allowed us to experiment with these techniques, but incorporate them into a slick live action commercial, tapped into everything we’re about.”

CREDITS

Directors: Richard Chaney & Gavin Kelly
Producers: Emily Brady, Dave Burke & Aileen Heavey
2D Animation: Conor Whelan & Mark Shaw
PreViz: Mario Domingos
Editor: Iseult Howlett
Flame: Arron Inglis
DOP: Simon Walsh
Agency: Guns or Knives
Creative Director: Kevin Keenan
Creatives: Kevin Keenan & Barry Smith
Agency Producer: Al Byrnes & Barbara-Ann Chaney
Client Service Director:  Róisín Field
Sound: Locky Butler
Voice Over: Michael Gambon