Make America Sleep Again.
Nectar Sleep | Make America Sleep Again
Nectar Sleep is the fastest-growing eCommerce mattress company in the world. The company is based in San Mateo, California, with its distribution centers in Washington State.
Case Study
BlackBoard Studios was approached to produce a YouTube commercial for the US-based Nectar Mattress company, from start-to-finish.
The concept was provided to the studio and the entire implementation was up to BlackBoard. The project entailed long-distance auditions, creating the set of a sleep lab, flying the main actor to Israel for filming and, of course, conveying the importance of a good night’s sleep (especially on a Nectar Mattress) to people’s brains.
The Biggest Challenges
Creating Animated Characters with Distinct Personalities – With the theme of the commercial relating to the impact of sleep on people’s brains, it was important to create animated brain-characters with very distinct personalities: a tired, cranky brain; a perky, happy brain; and world leader brains of Trump, Putin and Kim Jung Un. Not only did the BlackBoard creative team wrestle with conveying the brains’ personalities, but with their expressions (using 2 modeled facial expressions) and hair (using 3D mesh).
Combining Live Action with Animation – The main actor and extras in the video were filmed a long time before the brain characters were added during the post-production process. While filming the actors, the Studio positioned proxy models of similar size for reference. Integrating the brain characters also required adaptation of light and shadows, as well as textures, to ensure a realistic effect. In the scene where the actor has a tub of popcorn, the brain moves the tub – an effect achieved by tying a string to the popcorn and dragging it during the live shoot.
