Watson-Wood Goes Pubic With His New Promo

Last week saw the release of Christopher Watson-Wood’s debut promo for Swedish-indie band, Francobollo.

Entitled Wonderful [above] the promo follows a ball of unwanted pubic hair as it gains sentience and goes through a melancholic drug-fuelled break up with its ex-owner. To find out more about the promo, and the furball himself, shots caught up with director Watson-Wood to discuss the project.

Tell us about the video and the concept behind it.

This video is a story of unrequited love between an enchanting, sweet, ball of pubic hair and the beautiful woman who, unknowingly, jilts him at the plughole for another (human) man with beautiful hair - causing our hero to spiral into a jealous rage that leads to his untimely and tragic demise.

Where did the initial idea come from?

You don’t want to know…!  Let’s just say I had the idea one day ‘out of the blue’ and to my surprise, my wife (and producer) Amanda [Jones], loved the idea. We agreed that we’d have to make him look as cute as possible and that he (the hairball) needed to be a great little actor.  We wanted to be able to show-off the photoreal and sophisticated animation as if we’d made a loveable children’s film - even though the subject matter was definitely not. Ultimately, we loved the idea of something gross being really cute.

So this idea was in the back of my mind for several months and then one night at a party, we were chatting to our friend Charlie Andrew [producer] at a party about it and he had the idea of setting us up with Francobollo for a collaboration of like-minded, silly people who take their talents seriously (but not their videos.)

Were there any ideas that didn’t make the final cut?

Definitely. Though I like to carefully storyboard everythimg out ahead of time especially for a CG job like this, the ending was always sort of up in the air. There was a lot of back and forth about making it a “happy” ending for the hairball or like we ultimately decided, to let him have that very British, anticlimactic, tragedy ending instead where he doesn’t end up winning. We had some pretty gruesome, Shakespearean endings where he managed to hack away all of Sam’s beautiful hair (among other parts) and thought at one point that maybe he’d find his own pube girl up there in the nest but, in the end we quite like how it turned out (and the birds were a major plus too!)

How much conversation was there around what the hairball should ultimately look like?

Quite a bit. Amanda, the team and I talked in great depth about how he should look and especially about his eyes! What were the size of the eyes? How real did they look? (We went as far as to simulate the real expansion and contraction of the circular muscle fibre of the iris.) Do they take up most of his face? Does a pube have eyebrows? Some really important meta conversations…

And what were the challenges in making the hairball character come to life?

Though we’ve done some animation before - my short film Magnus is a magnifying glass who comes to life - we haven’t done anything as in depth as this as far as the facial animation goes.  Magnus is really rigid and we wanted this guy to have that fluidity and over exaggeration that so many loveable Pixar characters have. So, that was a challenge and a worry throughout the process and took quite a bit of trial and error. We used Houdini to model our CG character as we’ve done before, but we also animated in Houdini for the first time. Also, we used Octane to render the film, which is a brand-new software that uses cutting-edge photorealistic GPU rendering (called “path-tracing”). The challenge there was that we didn’t know if it would work!

What input to the video, if any, did the artist have?

The guys in the band are really chilled out and were mostly just happy to let us get on with it!  And, we were very lucky to have Sam Bailey [Francobollo bassist] as a comedy sounding-board.  He’s very funny and had some great ideas to lend to the film!

What was the most challenging part of the production process? 

Probably budget. There wasn’t one.  So, since it was our idea and we really wanted to work with the band to make it for Mad Ruffian and them, we had to put all of our own time and resources into it (but happy to do so!) Luckily, the way Mad Ruffian works is that we can do it all ourselves so, other than the shoot costs of paying the crew and actors, we just did all the post ourselves in between our other jobs. We had to take time out to do a major push to hit the deadline, so the last few weeks were pretty manic!  

And the most rewarding? 

The HAIRBALL! We just love him.  He’s like our poor, heartbroken, slightly psychotic baby.  I love the way he looks and acts and could not have done it without Thanos Kousis - who is a brilliant animator - and came to spend two weeks with us at Ruffian Post bringing him to life.

As the band are just launching, was this added pressure to make a standout video?

There was pressure to get it done because it takes so long to do, but that is also because I’m such a perfectionist and wanted it to be the best it could be. Everyone who is involved is very supportive of them and I really think they’ll have their big break with this album (hopefully with this single). We hope that this will be mutually beneficial but regardless of the success of the video, they are damn good musicians and have a sound that makes you really want to listen to them - to me, they feel like the bands I listened to when I was growing up and they are so fun live! More than anything, I’m a bit bored of music videos and bands that are too cool and take themselves too seriously. These dudes are as silly as we are, and it made for a perfect marriage!

What are you working on next?

Mad Ruffian is shooting all of next year’s content for Reese’s next week, so that’s quite fun. We’re also doing a 2D adaptation of a kids’ picture book that has wonderful, hand-drawn illustrations. And, other than that, not sure what's next! We’re sort of hoping for a Pixels the movie type of thing where some studio picks this up and wants to do a feature-length adaptation about a sinister (but really sweet and misunderstood) ball of pubic hair that goes around terrorising NYC with a razor. So far no offers (but we’ll see!)