MassMarket worked with Lowe’s on their three-spot Spring Campaign conceived by BBDO and directed by Dave Meyers @radical.media to bring to life the infinite possibilities available to the modern homeowner from Lowe’s.
For Lowe’s “Spring Storage,” MassMarket helped to realize BBDO and Dave Meyer’s vision of a large garden unrolling through the air. The spot follows a woman to her basement where she pulls a garden quilt from a closet. With a graceful throw, the quilt unfurls over her barren backyard. From the quilt pops up thousands of brilliantly colored flowers, lush grass, garden decorations and garden care products.
Meyers wanted the experience of the woman tossing the garden into the air to be dynamic, but equally effortless. It was important that the quilt behaved much in the way parachute fabric floats to the ground in the interactions with the decorations and products as they settled into place. The event needed to feel magical, but behave in ways the audience could relate to.
Starting with storyboards, the team created a pre-viz of the basic action and timings, helping to decide which objects would be real and those that would be CG. Final shots used backplates of either the finished garden, part of the garden, or a barren lot, depending on what would best serve the action, effects and reference.
After the shoot, Cutting Room worked through the selects and created an assembly for MassMarket to start working with. As the effects progressed, MassMarket worked with BBDO & Meyers to modify the edit to suit the action.
Meanwhile, the CG team created an unfurling garden comprised of thousands of flowers, grass, and Lowe’s gardening products. Every flower and product was digitally recreated in detail and then animated to move in a way that no garden has ever moved before.
Lastly, the CG elements were seamlessly combined with the live action photography to create the final shots.
The Lowe’s “Coloring Book” spot follows a young couple as they draw the features of their home over walls made of paper. As each basic sketch is finished, the real feature of the home bursts through the paper. The viewer is led on an energetic and magical transformation of the living room window, hallway, bathroom, staircase, frames, and lastly the doggie door. A home that began as a blank slate is made comfortable and colorful. The woman enjoys her new home by looking over the Creative Ideas magazine on her iPad. Published by Lowe’s in print, online, and through Apple’s App Store, the Creative Ideas magazine illustrates how to make a home in clever and crafty ways.
Meyers wanted “Coloring Book” to be the perfect mix of dynamic, tangible and playful. The spot needed to reflect the potential personalization and ease in the creation of a home. At first, in conversations, a predominantly CG approach was considered. We then moved to a more practical approach to make the actions throughout feel as natural as possible.
The majority of MassMarket’s work was cleaning up and integrating the practical effects that were done on set using Nuke, Flame, Maya, Mental Ray and Boujou. Many of the rigs required the removal of pull strings and support structures. MassMarket created several pieces of the animated paper in post and enhanced or created the line drawings. The iPad was entirely CG and several blue screens were replaced with building extensions and outdoor exteriors.
In Lowe’s “Fresh Cut Grass,” MassMarket worked to bring to life the essence of springtime as a vaporous green mist that enters a home, tantalizing the senses and inspiring people to get outside and improve their surroundings.
In order to achieve the desired ethereal effect, MassMarket used 3DStudioMax, along with Krakatoa, Fume, and Particle Flow tools. To maximize time and resources, the team made use of a post-viz to rough out the overall blocking of the effect before final simulations were run.
For the behavior of the effect, the goal was to create something that felt like a fine, wispy mist with a self-driven fluid-like behavior. Effects that have both directed animation and physically plausible behavior can be some of the most difficult to create and we’re proud to say the result is a successful combination.
It’s always extremely fun to take a ride with Meyers and the team from BBDO. We couldn’t have been more pleased to help their campaign blossom!
