SunCola Fencing

SunCola "Fencing", 1998.

Every year throughout the nineties, a pair of SunTop/SunCola commercials were produced. And the SunCola ad always had the same concept:

Mr. SunCola competes in some kind of sport against his long-time foe Bob Bubble. On the face of it, the opponent is both bigger and stronger, and thus has all the advantages. But Mr. SunCola has his secret weapon: the non-carbonated SunCola drink, whereas Bob Bubble will have to content himself with an old-fashioned fizzy cola. Yuck!

On the other hand, Mr. Bubble has no respect for the rules of the game. So every film starts out with him playing some nasty trick on our hero, who therefore loses the first round. But as they both take a break for a drink, Mr. Suntop gets re-energized by his SunCola (while Bob Bubble is all gassy from his regular cola), and then, with a couple of elegant moves, Mr. Suntop  easily outmaneuvers his rival.

Here's the storyboard for the SunCola film of 1998.

SunCola "Fencing" storyboard by Dan Harder, 1998.

SunCola Skiing

SunCola "Skiing", 1997

Along with the SunTop "World Explorers" film, this 18 second TV ad constituted the annual SunTop/SunCola TV commercial pair of 1997. The two films were done in one stretch of eight weeks, six for the SunTop film and two for the SunCola.

That meant that I had to do 15 seconds of layout, animation, cleanup, inbetweening, coloring, camera etc. all by myself in two weeks. Quite a fun challenge!

The film was done for Co-Ro Food A/S, parent company of the brands SunTop, SunCola, Sunquick and Sun Lolly. I drew the storyboard based on a script worked out by the client in cooperation with a film production company called Planet Productions run by Lars Borch Nielsen.

SunCola "Skiing" storyboard by Dan Harder, 1997.

SunTop World Explorers

My journey with Mr. SunTop, the mascot of the softdrink brand of the same name, spans the full decade of the 1990s. During this time I worked on a whole string of TV commercials for the primary product, the orange drink, as well as its spin-off SunCola.

The films were made in pairs with one SunTop and one SunCola ad per year. Initially, my contribution was limited to storyboards, background layouts and animation. Other artists did the background painting, character cleanup and inbetweening. The coloring and camera work were done at Nielsen & Nielsen, the Borch Nielsen brothers' studio, on their expensive Silicon Graphics computer (coloring animated movies on a computer was kind of new back in the early nineties).

Mr. SunTop as Colombus in "World Explorers", 1997

But in 1997, having spent a few years working on various computer games, I realized that it was possible to make an entire film in my own little studio on nothing more than a regular Windows-based PC. I sold the deal to the client - sweetened by a very competitive price - and got to work.

The plan was to do the entire thing myself, so I had my work cut out for me: make a 30 second film in six weeks. That is, 5 seconds of rough animation, 5 seconds of  cleanup and inbetweening and 5 seconds of coloring every week, plus layouting, color styling, scene planning, camera work, color adjustment and the rest of it. It was a fun challenge which soon turned into a 24-7 gig.

Storyboard by Martin Madsen, 1997.

The film had already been storyboarded (by fellow animator Martin Madsen), so I could dive right into the next phases: layouting, animation, cleanup and inbetweeing. I bought a flatbed scanner to get the drawings into the computer and a CD-ROM burner (which was also kind of new technology back then) in order to deliver the colored single frames to a video editing facility where the images would be combined with the sound and transferred to Beta SP video, required by the broadcaster.

For the backgrounds I called on my favorite background painter Thomas Dreyer, whom I had first met when working on a Guldkorn commercial some years before. Here's some of Thomas' backgrounds based on my BG layouts.

3D Pepsi Bottle

As briefly mentioned earlier, I had a bit of a flirt with CGI animation back in the early nineties.

In the summer of 1990 I animated and directed a couple of hand-drawn commercials for the small Copenhagen studio Nielsen & Nielsen, which were colored and composited on the studio's newly acquired supercomputer, the "Personal Iris" from Silicon Graphics. Then, from December 1990, after finishing animation at A.Film on Don Bluth's A Troll in Central Park, I actually worked for a couple of months at Nielsen & Nielsen as a CGI modeler and animator.

Well, animation is probably stretching it a bit, since I didn't really animate anything living, it was more like building and rotating various solid objects which were rendered with nice glossy surfaces using 3D software from Thomson Digital Image (TDI). In the end I decided against pursuing a career as an operator of this new technological wonder, fascinating as it was. But I still stayed in touch with the studio and animated some 2D commercials for them, and also served as an animation supervisor for my replacement at the computer.

One such project was this TV commercial for the then brandnew 1.5 liter softdrink bottles (we had never had bottles larger than 1 liter before in Denmark). The Pepsi bottle jumps into the picture and calls on all its new bigger friends: Pepsi Light, 7-UP, 7-UP Light and the Danish energy drink Faxe Kondi.

In this case I did a full hand-drawn animation reference for the action. The new tech guy, Michael Holm (with whom I later worked on a number of exciting and somewhat crazy projects - see future posts) then built the 3D bottles and matched them to the 2D ref. It's pretty simple, and the result isn't perfect, but it was probably the first CGI "character animation" made on Danish soil, so it does have some historical significance :)

The flic above is grabbed from an old VHS tape. Below is the original storyboard from the advertising agency. (As you can see it's a fax - oh, what wonderful eighties' technology!)

Gevinst-Giro Piggy Bank

Among the VHS tapes in the old boxes in my attic I came across these two TV commercials for a special savings scheme with the chance of winning a grand price of millions of Danish kroner. The ads were done way back in 1990 for "Postgiro", a branch of the Danish postal service which has long ago been gobbled up by one of the big Danish banks (which was in turn swallowed by an even bigger one).

The two films were produced by Nielsen & Nielsen, a small company in Copenhagen which had just purchased a very expensive high-end computer system (from Silicon Graphics), and so they were among the very first in Danish animation to be colored on a computer.

I did the animation, and in order to utilize the new exciting tool, I grabbed the chance to do something which was normally way too expensive for our small budgets: colorseps. That is, a border between two colors without the black line.

In the old days of hand-painted cels the colorseps would also have to be inked by hand, which was extremely time-consuming. In this case I simply had the cleanup artists draw the separation line between the two orange colors on a separate level, and then we colored it in the paintbox so it would be invisible. The same goes for the red triangles. It's a simple effect, but it does look nice. And with this new computer technology, it was done at almost no extra cost.

As a curiosity for the Danes among the blog readers, the speak for the ads was done by none other than the late actor Axel Strøbye, whom we all love for his roles in Olsen-Banden and Matador (the latter is the best TV series ever done in the whole world - you should check it out!).

Along with the video tapes I also found the original storyboards from the advertising agency. This is the board for film #1.

Here's the board for film #2, and below is the final film.

Guldkorn

This TV commercial for OTA Guldkorn (a Danish cereal product) is one of two 30 sec films produced by A. Film and Jørgen Klubien (Klubien Animation) in 1991. I did about half of the rough animation, some of which was re-used between the two films.

The video of film #2 above is grabbed from a 24 years old VHS tape, de-interlaced and cleaned-up to the best of my ability. I only animated the middle part of the film, that is shots 3, 4, 5 and 6. The rest was animated by former Valhalla animator Henning Nielsen. I don't seem to have a final soundtrack for it, so I left it with just the music.

Here is a modelsheet of the teddy bear and a background layout for one of the shots, both drawn by Jørgen Klubien.

Choco Bolo

I went through some old boxes in the attic and found a bunch of VHS video tapes with various animation stuff dating back to the late 1980's. Amazingly, most of the tapes were still more or less watchable, and with a cheap video grabbing device and some patience I managed to clean some of them up to an acceptable quality.

One of the films was a TV commercial for some chocolate crackers called Choco Bolo, which I animated back in 1991 for A. Film and the Danish Disney animator Jørgen Klubien, who was apparently taking a break from Disney at the time. In this case I also found the original animation roughs as well as a copy of Jørgen's storyboard for the film:

Choco Bolo storyboard by Jørgen Klubien 1991.

The film consists of one single shot lasting 15 seconds (plus some live-action). It may be slightly insane of me to share with you the entire 118 rough animation drawings - but what the heck, here we go:

BR Toys Christmas Ad

In the spring of 2000 I was asked by the advertizing agency of Scandinavia's largest toy retailer, BR Legetøj (BR Toys), to produce the company's Christmas TV ad for that year. Thus, I spent most of the hot summer drawing Santa Claus and his reindeer flying through the snow-covered landscape.

In the previous years BR Toys had released a new Christmas ad every year, so I was hoping to become their regular supplier of these films. But apparently they were so happy with this particular commercial that they have run it on Danish TV every Christmas since then. That would be 15 years now, and counting...

Let me share with you some of the artwork that lay behind the final film. This is the final storyboard that I did, based on a pretty good draft supplied by the advertizing agency, Nørgård Mikkelsen.

Storyboard, BR Toys Christmas TV Ad, 2000

The "cel" painting and camera work on this film was done on a computer. However, the backgrounds were painted in the old fashioned way. I was always especially pleased with these backgrounds, which were done by Thomas Dreyer, who supplied backgrounds for most of the commercials I produced in the 90's. Here's a selection of layouts and color BGs.