In summer 2019, Honda and RPA came to Hornet to aid in the creation of a holiday sales campaign that would stand out from typical CG holiday spots. Hornet responded by enlisting the combined talents of two of our most innovative world-builders: Sam Mason and Peter Sluszka. The former is a CG whiz; the latter, a stop motion veteran. Together, they created a world for “Happy Honda Days” that was made with the most iconic and nostalgic of holiday materials (wrapping paper) and conveyed through an addictive mix of stop motion and CG animation.
Two directors, two mediums, two 30-second spots (one for sedans, the other for SUV’s), the only thing missing for this holiday campaign was two turtle doves and maybe a partridge in a pear tree. More seriously, Sam and Peter, working in tandem, became a dynamic director duo whose styles went together like CR-V’s and off-roading, Civics and city-cruising, wrapping paper and presents.
To create the spots required equal parts endeavor and ingenuity. A lot of the leg work was done during the previsulation phase to establish scene scale between the handcrafted paper world and the CG Honda cars layered on top. From there, the graphic paper worlds were filmed with 3D tracking and motion-control so that the cars could be seamlessly composited in post-production. There was also a big design component, as all of the roughly 30 bespoke wrapping paper designs were originally created by the Hornet team.
“We really had to use our imaginations with some of the logic of the terrain, because we wanted the cars to look like they were driving fluidly and realistically even though the wrapping paper worlds were graphic and tactile. We wanted to make something old-fashioned and genuine that would bring to mind the tactile memories of opening presents as a kid.”
-Sam Mason
“It was a tricky one from a design perspective because we never wanted the world to feel like a perfectly literal miniature landscape. We wanted it to feel more abstract. Something that was iconic and clearly created from wrapping paper that would bridge the gap between your sense of physical space with a more graphic sensibility. We were always looking for interesting ways to create some sense of depth or travel.”
-Peter Sluszka
