Q&A with Chris McKenna, Co-founder and Creative Director, on Mixing Real and Graphical Ingredients
You can find Wee Beastie’s reel and expanded philosophy at their Web site (aptly small beast-themed): http://www.weebeastie.tv/. Season 2 of Ultimate Cakeoff began airing on February 1 at 10pm/9pm CT on TLC.
Watch the promo below and then read the Q&A.
Chris McKenna: Our company’s about four years old and I started it with my exec producer Monica Hinden. We were both previously working for Stun Creative, mostly on television promos. They were closing their East Coast office, so we thought we should start our own thing.
How did you get to focus on nonfiction series’ promos?
We fell into that because my background was working at the BBC in London and working in the promo department there and then I came to work for TLC in the states. So when I left and entered into the agency world, I still had a lot of strong connections with Discovery and TLC.
What do you like best about doing promos?
We really like doing conceptual work and the nonfiction networks seem to be more open to thinking conceptually about their advertising. Most of the fiction-based networks want to show their talent looking glamorous. Whereas the nonfiction networks will call up and say, you know we got this show that we don’t have any footage for about cakes and we need you to come up with some clever ideas to promote it. And we love that-its very creatively stimulating for us. When we pitch ideas to agencies we try not to think about the cost or execution of it-we’re just trying to come up with clever engaging ideas and then we’ll come up with ways to do it. We want our clients to think of us as an “idea factory” where we can come up with unique and creative concepts for any project. We believe in the art of the “brainstorm” and that no idea is too big or too small.
Did you motivate the concept behind the Ultimate Cakeoff spot?
We usually do-most of our clients come for us for concepts as well as execution. On this one our client came to us with a specific idea. He wanted to do a parody of 2001: A Space Odyssey-in the year 2011 the future is going to be cake.
How did you proceed from there?
We were given the assignment around 27 December, which gave us two weeks.
So for our first week we were planning a Stanley Kubrik pastiche. Then our client’s boss put us in another direction. She wanted it to move away from a 70s science fiction homage and be more fun and also appealing to women as well, since women make up a large part of the show’s core audience. She told us to incorporate the theme of “ultimate deliciousness.” We had done work for her in the past, a show called Property Ladder, which was 3D with graphics-all high-contrast, high saturation and fun. So we came up with this crazy, giant space-cake theme. We thought, we’ll make a galaxy made up of cakes and candy. We did some style frames and sent them to our client-and they liked it a lot.
The tight turnaround must have been a challenge…
It was tough. We had one week to prepare for the shoot [in LA] and do all the style frames and design and planning work. Then we had four days to do all the compositing and artwork before delivering it. We had done some style frames before we went into the shoot and we actually had a live composite while we were filming. We set it up so we could see Duran composited against some background just to see if it worked. That made the post process a bit easier since we kind of knew what we were going to do.
We came back to the office on the 4th of January and we worked on a variety of different style frames over the next two days. Then on the Wednesday before the Sunday shoot, the client sent over the direction of “ultimate deliciousness.” And we had someone design and make a cake in three days with this specification. It’s the cake that Duran is suspended over in the beginning. Our art director on the set, Tianna, sketched out this cake and then handed it off to the cake maker, who made it in about 48 hours. It blew my mind that she could create it so quickly.
Did you and the team get to have any cake?
The baker offered. We were at the end of the filming day. Monica and I were getting on the redeye and the crew was exhausted. So we had to throw it out-and that kills me. Although a lot of these cakes have polyurethane to make them hold up, so they’re not fully edible…
How did you shoot the promo? What kind of camera did you use?
We shot on tape just so we could move very quickly. We were going to shoot on file, with either the RED or P2, but we didn’t want to have to wait for files to copy. We wanted to be able walk off set and get directly on a plane because we knew we had to be editing in New York at 9am the next morning to make our deadline. So we shot on HDCAM SR. We flew back to NY, walked into an edit the next morning and we had the spot cut by lunchtime on Monday. It was off to the client and once they’d approved the spot we were able to start working.
Another aspect that made our workflow challenging was that we had to do some 3D work simultaneously with compositing and camera move work and rotoscoping. We ended up re-keying and re-rotoscoping a number of shots because, as we pulled the spot together, the client requested some changes. This created some duplication of effort.
What were some steps you took to get the job done in a tight timeline?
We were very happy with our workflow. We shot directly onto HDCAM SR tape, our DP provided really nice lighting and our new greenscreen made our post process very quick. Our DP recommended a company that we really liked, Composite Components (www.digitalgreenscreen.com). They have digital green and red and blue-all in stretchy fabric backings. Usually we go in and paint a site with digital green or chroma key green and we’ll spend a lot of time trying to get the keying right and rotoscoping and cleaning up. But when you look at this backing on a waveform monitor, there’s just one light and you see green and nothing else-it made it a dream to do the post.
What do you think are the next steps for workflow?
I’m fairly old school in that I like to have a physical tape and I meet a lot of people who like the security of tape, but the tape workflows are disappearing. We have to embrace the future of digital file-based filmmaking. At the moment, with every project, we need to devise a new workflow. We’re shooting on P2, we’re trying out XDDCAM HD, shooting on DVCPRO HD tape, or the RED or working with RED Rocket. The past two projects, we’ve been doing our post in Apple ProRes codec, which is great. So we’re looking into the AJA Ki Pro. I like that you can choose whatever camera and style of shooting and record it on one format, Apple ProRes, and edit with that.
