Brief:    A fantasy world built, as if by a child, using only wooden building blocks.  A segmented compilation of urban images that together build a familiar urban scene, where younger, x-gen college graduates can flirt and cohort after a long day working there way up the ladder of success.

This was the first of 10 spots for Mazda that Charlie and I did together.  It won many, many accolades and awards, including being published in Architectural Design Magazine, and used as an example of applied hypersurface architecture by Stephen Parella at Columbia University. Ironically, it won a CLIO for Best Animation, while actually not being animated - all live action.  The word was they thought we had computer animated the whole thing.  No.  During the course of the entire campaign we actually took 60,000+ photographs, in more than a dozen locations.  We made over 8,000 photographic prints, more than 10,000 color photocopies (for background buildings), cut over 12,000 blocks from wood, foam, or plastic, and constructed sets in both LA and Vancouver.

(1-4)    The chain of reference to maquette, beginning with (4) the agency scrap provided when we actually bid to win the first commercial - Protege, Cool World.  

Charlie responded to this with a reference to the Starnes Brothers collage style art (2), and together he and I plotted a course towards 
achieving something relative and fun.  

One of my early sketches (3) after Charlie & I figured out how we would build it, then once we got that, we had to work out what the city would be like, so I built a maquette (1).  This maquette is responsible for the shape of the set as it came to be.  

(5,6)    My art director, Fanee Aaron, on the floor of the studio (5), working out just how to make it all stay together, and placing buildings. (6) It is all starting to come together.

(7)    Finally, reconstructed on the platform, sky 
drop in place, and lit, the set has come together.

(8-12)    Production shots I took of the set, after 
Chuck Schuman had worked so hard to light it! We were shooting photosonics at one point and the temperature on stage got up to over 130 degrees F there were so many lights and NO air conditioning (using atmospheric diffusion) 

(13)    After the motion picture side of the commercial was wrapped, we proceeded with the stills shoot, which ended up like this, and finding it’s way to magazines, free post cards, and billboards. 
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