Q&A with Ian Kovalik, creative director of Mekanism

When Ian Kovalik, creative director of Mekanism, and his team were being considered for a refresh of Charles Schwab''s animated ads, they weren''t sure whether Schwab, Wall Street, or any other brokerage would still be around. Luckily for Kovalik and Mekanism, Charles Schwab survived and tasked Mekanism with creating several ads that directly addressed investors'' fears in the aftermath of the financial market collapse. For more from Kovalik, visit Mekanism''s Reel-Exchange profile.

What tools were integral to creating the spots for Schwab?

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Kovalik: I wish I could say we developed an amazing new piece of technology that will somehow change the future of animation. But the fact of the matter is that we ended up using something a little more 18th—no, 17th—century. The first week alone we unwrapped 16 new animators for the first couple of spots. The next week, half a dozen more. For every actor that was turned into animation, we needed six full-time animators to bring them to life.

We also had a bit of help from a little program called Motor, which I think was developed by absolute geniuses somewhere in the UK. This program allowed us to draw little tiny squiggles around someone''s nose and then track them across a shot. The squiggles would cling to the person''s nose as they moved around, turned their head, frowned, or laughed about the state of their bank account. We would then import the newly tracked squiggles into [Adobe] After Effects and fill them in with color and line information.

Read the rest of Kovalik''s Q&A

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