PES Avoids 'Creepy Severed Heads' for Honda

What was your brief for the ad?

It was pretty much what you see in the ad - kid's heads as hydrogen molecules singing a song, drawing attention to the fact that the only emission of the car was water. They had the rights to the song, so that was there from the beginning too.

When I started thinking about what I was going to, what I thought about in the first instance was these children's heads - what to do with them, how to get them to float, how to stop it looking like creepy severed kid's heads.

Part of solving this was just getting accustomed to Honda's style, which I think I've done over the three ads I've done for them. Another part was adding some of my own ideas. For example, one of the shots in the treatment was heads circling around other heads, like electrons circling a nucleus. I had to make them lose it as that brought creepiness. Luckily, Honda were really receptive to my ideas.

The old showbiz adage is 'never work with kids'. How did you find it?

Children are great! Although I'm best known for the stop-motion stuff, I've actually done a bunch of live action, and children have sometimes been a part of that. This was a tricky production from a technical standpoint, however, because we had to film 165 kids over 4 days, which we did in cycles of 24, with 8 kids singing the song itself. They were great, it was lighting them that was the challenge, so that we could CGI-in the electrons that circle them.


Why did you choose to do a new version of the song?

It was an interesting thing, because Honda largely left it up to me how to do it, how I wanted the song arranged. It's really not that typical as a director to have that kind of say.

We did the song before we did anything else, and we wanted to make it powerful, withholding the chorus until just before the reveal to give the ad a sense of progress as you tried to work out what this song you knew was. Luckily, I picked a great composer in Jeremy Turner to do this.

What were the technical challenges?

In a way, they were quite similar to those on my animation films - just the amount of prep needed. 165 heads across 4 days using motion control units is a lot of work, and we had to lock-in faces and worry about the practical lighting. Weirdly enough, jellyfish were what helped me solve that - floating jellyfish were my visual inspiration for how it could look and be lit.

Although this is not a stop-motion piece, there's a definite link to your stop-motion shorts like 'Fresh Guacamole' - both pieces have you representing objects with other objects. How much do you see this ad as an continuation of that work?

It's funny, because I actually saw it as a great opportunity to do something really different! But I guess that link is there, I'd never thought about that. I saw it as something very different for me, which is really important to me in my career - I don't want a 10 years ago version of me pitched back at me.


Should we expect more of this sort of work in the future?

I hope to something as ambitious as this again, but doing new things is crucial to me right now. Luckily, I have a special connection with RPA and Honda, and they keep feeding me challenges. I'd love to see other clients dream big like they do. They're willing to do big projects with practical effects, things that are magical but still have human warmth. I want to do more of that in the future. Luckily I work with great production companies like Reset in the US and Blinkink in the UK that allow me to produce ambitious work.

Personally, I want to balance my original content and comms work more, and create new stuff - no more cooking films!