At the Whistler Film Festival you won’t find the usual Hollywood movies. So Dare Vancouver created an ad campaign that tells unexpected stories. Trailers created for the festival start like predictable Hollywood movies, but take a hard left turn.
We worked very closely with our friends Rob and Bryan (who went on to set up 123 West Vancouver http://123w.ca/) to make this trailer. We took inspiration from the very hard to fault Tangled. Disney had 4 years and 140 million dollars to make their film, we had five weeks and a slightly smaller budget.

We have been lucky enough to work on some awesome commercial projects and this is one of our favorites. Working with Nike's in-house art department helped us understand exactly what they were after and we generated literally hundreds of character designs in what was a very rewarding collaborative process. What makes this project so special though is that it encompassed so many of our creative disciplines. Not only did we get to design and animate the characters, we also saw them sculpted into life-sized figures that were showcased in trendy footwear stores worldwide.

From start to finish this is one of the most enjoyable and rewarding campaigns we have worked on. We were initially approached to redesign Morty the bison mascot for Canadian mobile company MTS. They liked our work so much it quickly ballooned into a full blown campaign that kept us busy with up to 10 x 30 second commercials a year. We worked with a lot of very talented people over at Dare Vancouver and ultimately worked with Rob and Bryan on the Whistler film festival trailer and went snowboarding with them in Whistler.

The micro EPIC Kitteh Kitteh series; 12 years in the making and pretty much as good as Avatar, but shorter. This screened at the Edinburgh Film Festival, and a whole lot of others too, but we actually went to Edinburgh and got to sit in the cinema and soak up the rapturous applause.

Guy Richie wanted to have a little bit of animation in his movie Revolver. We were only to happy to oblige and here are the results. The budget was tiny and the schedule was criminally short. The rendering software didn't really exist at the time to create the look we were going for but given those restraints we were delighted with the results. And working with Guy was a great experience.

We worked with the guys over at 72 and Sunny in L.A. on this project. The best commercial work we have ever done has come out of close collaboration with our clients and this strange little project for Zune is a great example.

With the support of MTV and QOOB we created three short films. They took years to complete as most short films tend to. Here you can see the trailers for two of them. The third is still in production and will hopefully be released some time in 2043.

The first project we created for television over ten years ago.

MTV had a microscopic budget for this ident, so we took that budget and moved to Bangkok to do the work, we rented a marble floored apartment with a sauna, gym, Jacuzzi, and swimming pool on the roof. Then we blew the whole budget on cocktails and ladyboys. Did the work too.

Saatchi & Saatchi L.A. had been in touch with us when we released the second tokyoplastic website in 2004. They were really keen to find some way for us to work together and this project, a number of years later, was the result. It is one of the closest collaborations we have had with an agency, we were involved in the process from script writing through to the final grade and were able to create some unusual, creative and ultimately very successful car commercials.

This campaign started as print and we saw the posters all over London. It was one of those occasions where you think “wow, that's amazing, I wish I'd been involved” and then Weiden & Kennedy got in touch and wanted us to do the TV. Working in advertising is usually like God taking a massive shit on all your dreams but this project went right from start to finish. It had the support of competent, insightful, creative people at the agency who's input enhanced the project rather than their egos. It was unusual, kind of strange, and an absolute pleasure to work on.

Sometimes restrictions force creativity. The brief for this project was pretty simple: the ordinary transforms into the extraordinary. But the Executive Creative Director didn't like magic, or anything mystical, or anything too high tech, or futuristic Sci Fi stuff (yeah I know!). Those restrictions on one hand seriously limited our choices but on the other forced us to come up with more unusual ideas.