Oh Yeah Wow Excite Us Again

Even before Movember there was facial hair, and it was trimmed, styled and grown into many a magnificent shape not solely confined to the upper lip area. This brilliant spot from the ‘down under’ based directors Oh Yeah Wow celebrates all that has been done in the past 100-year history of trendy trims in their trademark stop-motion style, giving us an inventive chronology of the male through the ages. You can see all the fun they had making it here.
 

After crafting iconic videos for the likes of Gotye and Clubfeet, it’s good to see that the multi-talented, multi-disciplined directors are living up to their high standards and paying homage to the ritual of male-grooming! They leave not a single detail overlooked in their bringing to life of this brilliant concept by Grey/London, mixing live action with animation seamlessly. 
 

Watching the stubble take life and transform their gent was such a treat that we decided we had to catch up with the guys and find out how you get someone to sit still for a whole century and what they look for in ‘a man’.

 

 

 

Ah thanks! The bass notes of the concept were well and truly in place, but I guess we really worked closely with them to figure out the best possible transitions between era’s- whilst still retaining some class. We tested extensively and I shaved off my prized facial hair to win the job…

 

 

Our wonderful representation Caviar thought this would be a project up our alley… Which it was. I’d never animated facial hair before and accepted the challenge!

 

 

It was a pretty rigorous process, but I didn’t want this looking like a bad costume party. I wanted the looks and styles to be quintessential and indicative of the time, but not so much so that it looks like a parody. I wanted a certain era specific authenticity to shine through…

 

 

I personally wanted to cast 37 beautiful women, but Gillette remained adamant they wanted a man. Something to do with them marketing a male razor or something…

 

We spoke at length about our man, and really wanted him to be worldly in appearance. A fellow who’s story you wanted to know- in short a character of interest. Bobby, was certainly that man- and he had some healthy facial hair going on too.

 

 

We did underestimate how long it was going to take. We’re trained animators (myself and Sam Lewis- our lead animator at Oh Yeah Wow) but even then, we had no idea how tricky this was going to be. We were gunning for perfection of course (that elusive beast) and the weird thing about animation is, the better you get at it, the longer it takes. Given we were applying facial hair, and cutting down his hair frame by frame- some frames would take 40 minutes to complete- which took the shoot from 5 x 10 hour days to 5 x 16. That was an unexpected curveball, but in the grand scheme of things, a very easy one to deal with.

 

 

Answered that one above I think…

 

 

Yeah, I think it’s definitely something that isn’t seen a lot- due to the sheer amount of work involved. I love stop motion- its my medium of choice- but at the same time I really love live action, so hybridising seemed like a good idea! I think our clip for Gotye was where we first started to seriously play with blurring the lines…

 

 

Defintely harder. There are so many muscles in the face- so many variables- and when we have so much time in between frames, it’s incredibly hard to keep track of- especially when poor Bobby has already been in the chair for 12 hours. Its funny, sometime you could see his face becoming increasingly unhappy over the course of the day- but reset to happy just after our well catered lunch.

 

 

Straight ahead, start to finish. Because of the transitional nature and the scheduling, it was the only feasible way- other than going down a VFX/ Post heavy route. I’m a bit of a purist though, so I really wanted to keep it in camera and organic wherever possible. Asides from fixing a few stray hairs in post- we animated everything on set.

 

 

Answered above again!

 

 

I’m never worried about creating new content… People will always emulate unfortunately- and as we mentioned in our press release regarding the One Direction stuff, we’re not against creative evolution but some people simply aren’t creative!

 

Our Paper Kites video was recently ripped off by an Australian TV station too- it’s just unfortunately become part of the landscape now! The people in the know will always rally behind you when it occurs, and will always know the original.

 

 

Lots of super exciting stuff! Shooting a couple of new shorts at the moment- one live action, one plasticine/clay animation but an animated kids series I’ve been developing with Nickelodeon for about 2 years is finally going into pilot territory- so I start production on that in the coming weeks which is uber exciting for me! So yeah, sinking the teeth into the narrative stuff again and working towards that end game…