The Lights at the End of the Tunnel: Animating Riverbanks Zoo's Wild Lights in Claymation

Riverbanks Zoo and Garden, one of the top-ranked zoos in the United States, needed television and web spots for Wild Lights: a new after-dark event featuring illuminated animal sculptures, before any footage of the event existed. Soda City Films, working through agency partner Flock & Rally, built the entire video campaign with animation: a fully original claymation-style 30-second TV spot created from scratch. The spot was on air before the gates opened. Soda City Films brought home an ADDY for this one. But we'll get to that another time. Let's start from the beginning...

When Flock & Rally came to us with a new project for Riverbanks Zoo, they were carrying a brief that, on paper, was a "toughie". They needed television and web spots to promote Wild Lights, which was all kinds of lanterns from fungi to animals to sea creatures. The catch? No professional footage existed yet. No B-roll. No previous year to pull from. The lanterns themselves weren't even installed for us to film. We had a campaign to deliver and absolutely nothing to point a camera at.

So we floated an idea we had never actually done before: what if we just animate it? (spoiler: it worked)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gWr7K_zHc-0

Why Animation Was the Only Real Answer

When you can't film something, you build it. We'd already gotten our feet wet working with an animation team for the Boo at the Zoo spot the year before, and the experience taught us two things: animation gives you full creative control over an event (or in last years case, a rhinoceros) you couldn't otherwise capture, AND animation actually holds up pretty well on TV. It stops the channel-flip. It looks like nothing else in the break.

We pitched it, and Flock & Rally said "go". Sick.

Step One: Sketches and Lantern Builds

First came pre-production, which on an animation project is basically all the production. We started with simple builds of the "lanterns" themselves. In real life these are massive illuminated sculptures (think Chinese lantern festival, with a South Carolina zoo flavor). In our pre-vis they started as rough drawings. A lot of rough drawings.

Step Two: Shot Design

Once the lanterns existed in our scene, we designed every shot, including camera moves, where each subject lived in the frame, and how long each shot held before cutting. In a live-action spot you can grab extra coverage and place it in the edit. You can do different takes and try different things, because something else might work better in the edit. In animation, every frame costs time and money, so the storyboard basically locks in your final cut before you've animated a single second.

Step Three: Picking a Style

The look went through a few rounds. We landed on a claymation style because it felt handmade and warm. Basically, the same energy as walking through a zoo at night with your kids. Also, our animator loved this style, and since we were on a timecrunch (always the time crunch), we were like "yes, ok, great". Anyway. Textures got keyed and re-keyed, movement got tweaked to mimic the slight stutter of real stop-motion, and the whole spot started to feel less like an ad and more like a Saturday-morning special.

Step Four: Lighting — the Part That Nearly Broke Us

Animating a commercial whose entire premise is "look at these glowing lanterns at night" is a fun thing to pitch and a brutal thing to execute. Every light in the scene had to behave like a practical light, like a glowing animal sculpture surrounded by darkness, casting color and shadow onto the ground, the trees, the path. We had more than a few "okay, how do we actually do this" moments. The lighting pass alone burned through an embarrassing number of revisions. Honestly, we've done two more of these since this project, and the process has gotten WAY better, faster, smoother... all the words.

Step Five: Render. Master. Render Again.

Then came rendering over and over and over again. Each iteration meant another long render pass before we could even tell whether the change had landed. Roughly a full month of back-and-forth with our animator, every revision triggering another wait, every wait followed by another round of notes. Animation is a slow medium and there is no shortcut.

But the spot turned out fantastic! Wild Lights had a TV commercial that actually looked like the event it was promoting. It was magical and slightly weird, AND we had it on air before the gates opened. Winning for the client is all that matters.

"Seeing the Light"

We loved this one. Big thanks to Flock & Rally for trusting us with the brief and to Riverbanks Zoo for letting us build their event from scratch in a parallel universe. It's not every day that you work with folks that trust you enough to do something you had never done before on a short timeline, simply because you said, in no such words, "trust me, bro".

If you're a brand or destination with an event that doesn't have any existing footage yet — or a story that doesn't quite fit a traditional shoot — we love this kind of problem at Soda City Films. Drop us a line.