How a Production Technique from Lord of the Rings Brought MANSCAPED’s ‘Boys’ to Life

While trawling through endless pits of data about men, one undeniable fact stood out to the creative department at Pereira O’Dell: 100% of men love their balls. 

It was this core insight that the agency relied on when shaping its new campaign, ‘The Boys’, for MANSCAPED. The male grooming brand’s goal for the campaign was to stop treating male groin grooming like a taboo. But doing so - talking plainly about men’s nether regions in a TV-safe way - was a challenge, one that was solved by an impeccably childish visual metaphor in which every male’s testicles are depicted as a pair of miniatures - the boys - identical to each character. The kicker is that their hairstyles change throughout the spot, once MANSCAPED has worked its magic.

“We knew we needed a visual metaphor to help us talk about groin grooming, but we wanted one that would allow us to tell a different kind of story,” says Julie Rutigliano and Fernando ‘Bisnaga’ Passos, creative directors at Pereira O’Dell. “A love story between a man and his balls. The visual of a man with his two identical miniatures came pretty early in the process, and we never looked back.”

The initial idea for the boys came from the “glorious brains” of an all female team, Sophia Held and Lily Ramos. Julie and Fernando tell us that they had a pile of scripts with all different metaphors, but the boys stood out to them, instantly identifying what the idea could become. “We could highlight the emotional connection between men and their body parts, create a whole world where men and their ‘boys’ have all different hairstyles, and the hero would be MANSCAPED, and its most advanced ball trimmer—The Lawnmower 5.0 Ultra,” they say. 

To bring their vision to life, Pereira O’Dell enlisted the help of Ruckus Films founder and director JJ Adler and the VFX expertise of KEVIN. “JJ was very in line with our initial vision of the boys,” says Julie and Fernando. “We aligned with her early on that this spot should feel much more cinematic than typical comedic commercials. She was the one who decided to shoot everything practically to make the effects feel more natural.”

“The concept and the agency deck was just hilarious,” adds JJ. “Everyone at Ruckus Films and our team at Hustle were all-in the moment it hit our desks.

“I was lucky enough to weigh in on execution and tone,” she adds. “How are we going to accomplish this? What's the overall look and feel? I got to flesh out the world and bring several fun little builds and details to the party. My main goal was to create an approach that would lend a sense of elegance and sophistication to a concept that is - in the funniest, best way - incredibly juvenile.”

The boys were always envisioned to be full people, identical to the man, shrunk to hup height. But they wanted the minis to be more than just a shrunken man. They needed to have their own unique presentation that, in the words of JJ, “felt both dignified and very very silly”. 

So, as a first step, the team created some ground rules for their appearance: the boys were always proportional, shrunk to hip level; one boy is always a tiny bit shorter than the other; the hairstyles are authentic to pubic grooming; the boys don’t speak but they show emotion. “We knew seeing the mini humans reacting and behaving like testicles would be both hilarious and trigger an emotional connection within the viewer,” add Julie and Fernando. 

What’s more Gareth Parr, VFX supervisor at KEVIN, led an exploration to figure out the right sort of head to boy proportions, with the aim of landing somewhere that was specific and cute without being too cute. The desire to have the boys appear identical to their human ruled out casting children and small adults, so from there it was a matter of testing how to shoot and research how this has been done in-camera in the past. The key thing was to make sure that perspective was correct between the minis and the hero. 

Gareth and the team’s research led them to a technique called ‘forced perspective’, which was used to great effect on Elf by making Will Ferrell’s character larger and on Lord of the Rings, making the hobbits smaller in relation to the world and characters around them. A key task was measuring the camera distances from the subject and calculating its position for the takes of the boys, says Gareth. 

“It was key that we captured [in-camera] the correct perspectives of the boys,” he adds. “If our camera was positioned on a mid shot on our hero, it would be showing the tops of our boys' heads. So we measured heights and distances and employed some good old fashioned pythagoras to calculate our mini boys camera position. We then filmed the boys on a green screen in the same lighting so we can compost them cleanly onto the hero take.”

“From there, it was a matter of tracking one pass to another and adding some shadows or interaction. One of the alterations we did make was to scale up the mini’s heads slightly to further remove ourselves from the world of being scaled down. It makes them a little off kilter.”

“Post production and VFX planning guided quite a few decisions for us,” adds Keith Cecere, executive producer at MANSCAPED. “We had to plan and shoot three times the amount of content generally needed to accomplish the VFX as planned. Once in post, we had a triple layer of reviews as we had the story to cut with the hero image, then the comp layers to edit and review.”

The trickiest component of this part of the process, says Gareth, was lining up plates. “If you have a locked camera and no movement from actors, it’s basically photoshopping a still. We decided to make life interesting by having actors walking on a beach with a camera that is panning and interacting with themselves. It made for an interesting frame-by-frame scenario, tracking feet to shadows in sand.”

“In standard forms of production so often we overshoot to cover the bases, which is often necessary,” adds Keith. “With this layered or plate shooting technique, we had to be intentional and calculated for these shots to line up in post.”

For the casting of the hero and his boys, the team saw several actors across Europe, searching for men to emotionally connect to the hero. According to Julie and Fernando, they had to see a bit of themselves in him, root for him, and celebrate the moment he gave his boys some love. They needed talent who could communicate without words and with the performance feeling disingenuous or slapstick. Every actor needed to convey three separate personalities as the main male and each of the individual boys. To boot, they needed actors willing to shave their entire face, body and heads. 

For the hero, they found Pete Grimwood in London. “He was the exact guy we all had in our brains,” says JJ. “Dashing, but also the guy next door. Sharp comedic instincts, grounded sensibilities. He could embody the cool-ish ‘hero’ but also play the silly, childlike ‘miniatures’ to a T. And Pete is a stuntman! So nothing fazed the guy. Let me tell you, this guy should have been fazed. Not to mention he let us shave his entire head! Like, can you even imagine?”

For the production, Ruckus partnered with 24/7 in Palma de Mallorca. “Our amazing producer Franny Freiberger worked with the local team who were dynamite,” says JJ. “We had two MVPs with us from the US: cinematographer Damian Acevedo and Gareth from KEVIN. Damian, Gareth and I planned all the shots according to tons of visual references and a detailed animatic I'd created beforehand and with their input. Our art director Guido Konijn built us some stunning sets, and we found great locations.

“Our wig genius, Raquel Alvarez, designed so, so many custom wigs. And then there was the very complex puzzle, which involved several men, each playing three versions of himself per shot, hours long hair and special effects, makeup transitions... which all had to be accomplished fast enough to match daylight across all layers of each shot. This massive scheduling headache was skilfully alleviated by our AD Matthew Clark in coordination with the whole 24/7 and Ruckus Films production teams.”

“When an interesting creative concept presents itself, don’t let the technical challenges stop you from doing it,” adds Keith. “Build the team that says yes, then figure it out. Never let technical challenges stop a great idea from coming to life.”