Team Detroit's Animated Rant on the Ingredients of Ford's Super Duty

The end-to-end commercial design and production teams comprised of affiliated companies RingSide Creative and Cutters Studios divisions Flavor, Cutters and Dictionary Films are very proud to detail their contributions to a new national spot for Ford Motor Company from Team Detroit.  Entitled "Front and Back," the 30 second spot extends the long-running Ford Trucks "Rant" campaign with a bold, powerful homage to heroism and reliability, using a hybrid design and animation style and original live-action footage shot on-location in Los Angeles.  The spot debuted nationally earlier this month and will continue to air in targeted placements online, during high-profile broadcasts and on cable.

"Over the past couple of years, the visual inspiration for our F-150 Rant campaign has been the work of Saul Bass," explained Brad Hensen, group creative director at Team Detroit.  "We've tried to have a lot of fun with positive and negative space.  For Super Duty, we wanted to keep a sense of that visual language, but give it its own identity.  Brad Tucker and his team at Ringside/Flavor/Cutters hit it perfectly.  In fact, it was difficult to choose from the multiple options they provided.  It was a great experience because they guided the project through every phase."

"It is a real privilege for us to have earned this assignment from Team Detroit, and to have the chance to present a single, unified front to take this iconic campaign to new dimensions," said Brad Tucker, Flavor's executive creative director.  "To create the look, we experimented to find new ways to marry 3D, live-action, traditional cel animation and motion graphics.  The experience brought out the best from all of us while opening the doors to a new era of collaborations with Team Detroit."

Invited to pitch by Team Detroit executives including group creative director Brad Hensen, creative director Beth Hambly and executive producer Bob Rashid, certain technical challenges related to past "Rant" campaign spots factored into the creative brief.  "The bar was set very high in terms of having the graphics and the hero trucks maximize on-screen impact, and we also did a lot of work to create scene-to-scene transitions that have not been seen before," Tucker added.

With Tucker leading the design efforts, storyboards were created by RingSide's Keith Slawinski, Nicholas Mouhot and Paul Williams, and work commenced across the U.S.  RingSide also provided VFX, project and account management support.  Dictionary Films executive producer Chris Rossiter, line producer Richard Kaylor and their team then organized a shoot with 2015 Ford F-450 and F-250 Super Duty trucks in an LA-area quarry.  Working with director of photography Jordan Valenti, the crew used an ARRI ALEXA XT digital camera system on the Mercedes ML55 Edge System from Performance Filmworks, capturing footage at a variety of speeds, craning and rotating to present a multitude of shots for both truck models on different terrains.

Meanwhile, design and animation were occurring in Detroit at RingSide, with Adobe Photoshop and After Effects, and Autodesk Maya serving as primary production tools.  "The ability for us all to maintain close contact with Brad and the entire team throughout production was a key to this project's success," said Dave Peyton, RingSide's executive producer, who was integral in uniting the team efforts – which included more than a dozen creative artists in Detroit alone – and ensuring that work-in-progress and finished content reached Cutters editor Chris Moore as soon as possible.

"Essentially, Chris's early rough-cut became the template for each step to follow," Peyton continued. "That allowed us to lock-in timings, identify our selected truck scenes and complete rough comps... and it gave our clients the confidence that we were on the right track very early on."

RingSide artists also handled final project color, with staff colorist Rick Unger using Quantel's Pablo Rio to artistic effect.  "Each of the two Ford trucks had its own rotoscoped matte, which allowed me to manipulate in layers," he said.  "While we had a tight timeline, this approach provided an efficient means for unifying the colors to maximum effect."