With all the tech these days and the constant need for new…newer…newest..the amount of waste we are creating in this drive for more has been a problem for the planet for a while. Samsung takes aim at the issue with a series of initiatives designed to reduce waste and energy consumption. Watch just one of the four ads that CanCan Club has done to promote them and you may begin to feel a little hope. Of course it takes more than just well-made animations to help the planet, but from where we sit, it sure looks like a good start!
We sat down with Can Can’s Mariano Bergara to get a closer look at the making-of these four spots: Device Upcycling, Eco Innovations, Green Chip, and Reducing Waste. “The brand was interested in showing their innovations on how to repurpose old devices and also other interesting ideas on transforming their packagings into new useful stuff like furniture,” he began.
Hailing from Argentina, Bergara was straight with us from the beginning about the challenges that the teams’ various cultural divides provided. “Storytelling for a diametrically different culture is a huge challenge,” he said. “Another challenge was strictly about stop-motion. It usually is kind of a strange world for most clients and agencies in advertising and this was the case.
“Over the years we have refined a convenient ability to create a large quantity of thorough and detailed previs ranging from very rough boardmatics, to well animated animatics and stop motion animated tests. Most of the time as animators we don’t really need a lot of this material, but it works really well to spark our client’s imagination, bringing their minds closer to what they will see during the actual shooting.”
On the more concrete side, Bergara was happy to report that once they got the stories right, “luckily, all character designs, objects, props and BGs along with color palettes were really easily approved.” The pandemic, of course, provided further challenges. But they were all able to work mainly online during the design process, holding in-person meetings only when strictly necessary. “Our studio in Argentina is quite spacious and we were able to put together a small building crew and minimal amount of animators while designing prior to shooting.
“For building we used mainly paper, cardboard and painted wood and mdf. As a special detail we carved the heads and limbs of our characters in different colors and grains of wood to add a little diversity on their skins, that was so fun to make.” Each of the four pieces does a great job of explaining the somewhat dense processes at hand with a clear and entertaining knack, like how shipping boxes can be reused or your old phone can be upcycled.
Of the colorful, clean look the of the pieces, and useful text callouts, Bergara said, “We aimed to achieve a look as clean as possible with the designs, materials we used, and also animations to get something we started (joking about at first calling) ‘stop motion graphics.” That term stuck though and, “We reinforced it creating all those crazy elaborated transitions.” The result is four bright and fun pieces that tackle these important, sometimes complicated topics in ways we can all understand and even enjoy.