UPS Store: "Circus" TV Commercial by Doner

Client: The UPS Store
Spot titles: "Gladiator", "Circus"
Agency: Doner
EVP Account Management Director: Greg Gerfen
VP Account Director: Julie MacDonald
Executive VP, Director of Integrated Production: Sheldon Cohn
EVP/Chief Creative Officer: Rob Strasberg
Creative Director: Karen Cathel
VP, Creative Director: Jimmy Kollin
Senior Copywriter: Michael Gorelic
Art Director: Andrew Wright
Producer: Laurie Irwin
Production Company: Psyop, New York
Director: Psyop
Psyop Creative Director: Eben Mears
Executive Producer: Lucia Grillo
Producer: Lydia Holness
Associate Producer: Kay Chen
Designers: Ben Chan, Arisu Kashiwagi, Jungeun Jaye Kim, Kitty Lin, Helen Choi
Lead Technical Director: Tony Barbieri
Technical Director: Andreas Berner
CG Animation: Jordan Blit, Kitty Lin, Pat Porter, Russ Wootton, Gooshun Wang, George Smaragdis, Consuelo Macri
CG Modeling: Lee Wolland, Soo Hee Han
CG Lighting: Anthony Patti, Helen Choi, Russ Wootton, Shu-Chen Lin, Genessa Chamberlain
Flash animation: Jared Deal
Technical Consultant: Thomas Goddard
Lead Compositor: Molly Schwartz
Compositors: Manu Gaulot, Chris Gereg, Danny Kamhaji
Flame: Nick Tanner, Jeen Lee
Live Action Company: Tool of North America
Live Action Director: Tom Routson
Live Action Executive Producers: Jennifer Siegel, Brian Latt
Live Action Line Producer: Jeff Tanner
Live Action Production Designer: Peter Benson
Live Action Director of Photography: John Schwartzman
Editorial: The Underground
Editor (Psyop): Cass Vanini, Graham Brennan
Color Correct: Postique
Producer : Mike Digel
Colorist: John Cathel
Music Company: Elias Arts
Executive Producer: Dave Gold
Producer: Kala Sherman
Composer: Nate Morgan
Sound Design Company: Elias Arts
Producer: Kala Sherman
Sound Designer: Dean Hovey
Sound Mix Company: Sound Lounge
Mixer Peter: Buccellato

Notes on The UPS Store “Gladiator” and “Circus” from Psyop:
The brief from agency was to make worlds out of cardboard that felt simultaneously epic and handmade. We were also given the task of creating characters and environments that looked truly hand crafted with the caveat that everything must always be made of cardboard. We worked collaboratively on a series of scripts in order to finesse the story and craft these worlds.
One challenge we faced was creating a fully cardboard world that could feasibly have been created in a sound stage by stop motion animators. Each character had to be broken apart and looked at from the standpoint that if we were to create this in reality, how would they be built to allow the animators to have the full range of motion required. We didn't want the characters to look "CG", so we tried to not cheat by using tricks in 3D. This forced us to approach character setup with some additional boundaries that in some ways made setup easier, but in others forced to us to become more like mechanical engineers and really focus on the details of believable mechanics.
The geometry we created was also another challenge. 99.9% of the corrugation you see is modeled. We really focused on keeping the details in the model and to not rely on texturing tricks. This posed a challenge for our machines and our modelers. Without running on x64 machines and operating systems we wouldn't have been able to approach the project this way. Even still, we pushed Maya to the limits on what it can handle in a scene at once due to our geometry polygon counts being so high. It also pushed how much corrugation our modelers were able to handle before cracking mentally. Giving our geometry a "messed up" look without going too far was also a challenge. If we kept the geometry too clean, it ended up looking too CG. Psyop Creative Director, Eben Mears, kept referencing lasagna noodles whenever he saw corrugation that was too clean in dailies. On the other hand, if we pushed it too far our cardboard ended up looking like it came out of the garbage so we had to walk a fine line between the two. By keeping these details in the model, we didn't have to worry about getting nice details in model close-ups, shadow effects, or textural detail in lighting and shading. What we saw is what we were going to get in render, and that allowed us a lot more creativity up front.
As with most projects, the hardest part was fitting an epic tale into 25 seconds. All of the scripts read like short films and we worked hard to tell these stories in a visually powerful way but within a tight time frame. Beyond this, the design of the worlds and characters in each spot was intense. It’s an interesting struggle to design everything out of cardboard and make it look and feel “real”. Our use of corrugation and texture, plus the thought that went into the rigging of the characters was an epic struggle in and of itself.