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Model Marriage: Anifex breathes life into Mr Rental
[Mon 07/07/2008 12:53:11]
By Zona Marie Tan
 Since it began operations in 1991, you couldn’t put a face to the name Mr Rental. It wasn’t until 2007 that he came to life in his first stop-motion TV commercial, which Adelaide-based animation company Anifex was responsible for producing.
The specialised production company known for its stop-motion work was given the brief and a 2D cartoon of Mr Rental by BrandsRpeople2 to personify the company of the same name. And in three 30-second spots they brought Mr and Mrs Rental to life.
The ads were so well received that a year later, Mr Rental is back on the screens with yet another three 30-seconders that went to air May 25 in Australia and New Zealand. This time around, Anifex was put to the challenge of bringing to life the whole Rental family.
“In this set of ads, Mrs Rental takes a much bigger role,” explains director Michael Cusack. “That was partially because of the research done after the first three, which were all very well received and were very popular. People were saying ‘Let’s see a bit more of Mrs Rental’.”
Due to the commercials’ target market families (predominantly females in the 20 to 44-age bracket) the other new additions were the two children – a teenage son and a 12-year-old daughter.
“The little girl in the original design was about 16 or 17,” says Cusack. “But research revealed that the audience preferred a younger daughter. So we needed her to look the same, but we had to reduce her in size, change her costume to make her look younger, and also of course, lose her boobs.”
Although stop-motion animation is generally known for claymation, the characters in Mr Rental are actually not made of clay. Cusack, who is also one of the founders of Anifex, says while the company has done numerous other stop-motion ads such as Home Hardware and Schmackos, they put importance in going for a unique appearance for every client.
“What we try to do wherever we can is create a completely different look for each client. Even though its stop motion, it’s not ‘Oh, we’ve seen that before.’ So, we consciously go out of our way to create a look that’s specific to our client.”
For Mr Rental, Anifex worked with the initial 2D graphic drawings of the characters that they received and gave the ads a polished retro treatment.
“We saw that they were fairly slick, fairly smooth. So we decided that we would make the puppets out of a mixed media. Although a lot of people think its clay animation, there is no modelling clay involved in those characters at all.”
 The 30cm tall models of the Rental family were made in-house at Anifex’s workshop, out of individually coloured silicon from sculpted moulds. The characters’ heads, which are the size of grapefruits, were made from car bog – a type of resin.
“First of all, we would sculpt the character in modelling clay and then get approvals on the look from the client,” Cusack explains. “With the modelling clay, we create a mould of that character, obviously destroying the clay version in the process. Then an armature is made to go inside the character.”
The ball-and-socket armature, akin to a human skeleton, helps each model of the character to create movement and hold a pose for each of the 25 moves that results in one second of film.
The characters’ mouths, made separate from the head, were printed onto vinyl and cut out. So instead of the traditional head changes to represent each movement of speech and expression, the Mr Rental characters have stick-on mouths.
With the sets, Cusack says the team decided early on to create a world where the props the characters touch would be made three-dimensional, while the things that weren’t touched were printed 2D graphics. All of which produced the retro treatment Anifex was after.
“For example the side board on the wall, because the characters never refer to it and they never touch it, it’s just a printout stuck to the wall,” explains Cusack. “We’ve also put the shadows in as part of the graphic design, so the shadows for some of that furniture don’t necessarily match up with the lighting on the set. The idea was to give it this slightly odd look. Which is appropriate for Mr Rental because he’s a pretty odd guy.”
During the five weeks of the character and set designing and building stage, the voice recordings were also being done simultaneously. The voices of Mr And Mrs Rental, performed by Dave Taylor and Irina Dangov, and the two children had to be recorded first in order to be in sync with the characters’ mouth movements.
“Dave was a fantastic find,” says Cusack. “He’s got a quite manic approach to things and he loves performing. Because Mr Rental was quite a nervous character who was always in panic mode, it was a bit of a balancing act for Dave not to portray Mr Rental as annoying. But I think he [Dave] managed to get over the idea and just keep it funny. It’s a bit of a skill.”
With the voice files, the animation team then painstakingly created an animation log chart listing every mouth movement that would occur in one frame of film for each character.
When all the building and pre-production was complete, Anifex went through one and a half weeks of shoot using their wholly owned, US-imported, Sorensen Design Gazelle motion control rig, combined with a Mitchell Mark II motion picture 35mm film camera. This rig is capable of repeating precise camera moves at any speed appropriate for stepping through the frame-by-frame filming required on a stop-motion production.
 Their in-house DOP (Jo Rossiter ACS) and crew shot the labour-intensive production by working on two sets simultaneously. That meant there were three sets of each character that had to be ready for filming and as stand-by models in case of broken parts.
With two simultaneous shoot, Cusack has the task to ensure the coordination of the characters is delivered consistently, and humourously. For those visiting their set for the first time, he says watching the crew in action would be a bit strange.
“What we do to keep it consistent is we act out each character’s movements,” explains Cusack. “Which can be a little bit strange for people coming in for the first time. When I’m directing I’ll talk to the animators about how Mr Rental would move just as much as where he’s moving to and what he’s doing.
“For example in the washing machine commercial, Mrs Rental says to him, ‘It’s going to cost hundreds of dollars to fix!’, at which Mr Rental faints. And he faints in a Mr Rental way. So we would actually act that out.
“We would go, ‘Okay, so probably what he would do is he would lean back on his left foot, and reel forward his right foot… And then get a floppy wrist on his right arm, then starts to pirouette and then he would drop down.’ We work out every action beforehand. Once that was clear to the animators, they would note them down on the logging charts.”
Once shot, the footage was edited on Avid and finished on Flame at Oasis Post. The sound effects and music were designed by Timms Tunes.
The arduous production took 10 weeks to complete. Cusack says the biggest challenge was not in the demands of a stop-motion production but in keeping the ads fresh by putting enough detail and interest into the performances.
View the Mr Rental TVC here.
This article appeared in IF #111 July 2008
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