Recycle Me: A Stop Motion Musical Number

Now live on the internet is RECYCLE ME, a 30 second spot for North Country Recycles. Matthew White of 4th Coast Productions hired John Vincent and me to design the puppets and shoot stop motion, with Aaron Powell of Luna Digital handling the lip sync, CG staging, and compositing. Watch the commercial below:

When Matt came to us, he had the song already recorded and a general concept. The premise was that several recyclable items are thrown in a garbage can and they wish they’d been recycled instead. The “Recycle Me” song urges people think before throwing them away. After some brainstorming, I designed the characters and came up with a rough animatic.

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

Matt liked it, but wanted something cleaner to show the client, so he did an animatic with limited animation and more environment and lighting.

John got to work constructing characters, while I focused on label designs. We wanted miniature versions of most objects, and also fake brand names. In the case of the graham cracker/pasta piano, pizza box, and milk carton bass, I did mock-ups out of paper to figure out the templates. Then I could redo those templates in Photoshop. For the pizza logo, I did it old school — cut out a card stock stencil with an exacto knife and painted it on.

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

We decided to shoot each character separately, with no mouths or eyes. Aaron would comp them all together and add the facial features. The challenge was to come up with animation cycles in time with the music. First, I broke down each shot by time and frames (24 frames per second). 
You can see that although there are 13 shots, the characters repeat. So I’ve labeled the shots by letter. Drummer is C, Singer is D, group shot is E, etc. 

• 

• 

I broke down the audio track as an exposure sheet, focusing on the voice for Aaron to do the lip sync. But I had a lot of trouble picking out each instrument from the song. The audio was a mix-down, and scrubbing through in slow-motion sounded like mush to my ears.

Eventually, I realized that I could do some preliminary animation with colors and shapes in Flash, come up with loops that way. Then we could import those loops into our stop motion software to use as visual reference. Better than a traditional exposure sheet!

When it came time to shoot, John did the animation itself while I operated the Dragonframe software and kept his timing right. (I animated one shot of the pizza box falling.) Aaron took measurements and logged our lighting set-up so he could recreate it in a virtual environment using BlackMagic Fusion.

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

Overall, a rewarding project to be a part of. And I’ve had that “Recycle Me” song stuck in my head for five months!

Here are some short clips of character loops straight out of Dragonframe. If you’re on a computer, you can right-click on them and choose “loop” to see how they repeat. The tracking markers on their faces were to help Aaron position their eyes and mouths later.