In February, we featured Guilherme Marcondes’ beautiful mixed-media spot for British Gas. By way of Hornet Inc and the CHI & Partners, Marcondes has produced an additional ad, titled Switching. Animators Mike Luzzi, Frank Summers and Zoya Baker joined the project on the character animation front.

Man, Europe gets all the cool TV spots. Have a look at this new campaign Burger King Europe recently revealed. Led by Crispin Porter + Bogusky, Hornet Inc. director Peter Sluszka cooked up a series of 3 puppet ads under the True Fairy Tales theme. Using marionettes, Sluszka makes a donkey crap Euros and Little Red Riding Hood shake her bread baskets. Hysterical. Head over to the Hornet site to watch a third, titled Hungry Giant. A few shout-outs to puppeteers James Godwin, Tim Lagasse, and Steven Widerman and sculptor Michael Lawrence – great work gang.

Here’s Magic Donkey (subtitled in English):

I’ve been seeing this new Sierra Mist TV spot all over my glow-box, but I can’t sort out which animation studio is behind the curtain. It’s an ad for their new Ruby Splash flavor, and the campaign was initiated by Goodby, Silverstein & Partners. I’ll update this post when I sort it out. Mystery solved! It was done by Hornet Inc’s dynamic duo of Dan and Jason (Dan Abdo and Jason Patterson) – and in Flash. So in hindsight we shoulda splashed this all over ColdHardFlash.com.

Santa Maria, the Brooklyn-based twosome of Josh Goodrich and David Hill, have created a new PSA for the Ronald McDonald House Charities. The Dumbo Duo incorporate a panoply of animation styles (including stop-motion, hand-drawn, 3D, and matte paintings) into a surprisingly organic recounting of the fund’s mission and history. As the narration says, “things get better when they’re close to the things they love,” and it’s clear that a lot of love went into making this two-and-a-half minute spot, which was produced out of Hornet Inc. Watch the full PSA below, as well as a short behind-the-scenes look at Santa Maria in their studio.

It’s hard not to appreciate artists who deliberately choose to do things traditionally when using CG would be an easier choice.  And the icing on the cake is when the client is so in love with the director’s vision that they don’t question the harder path. So Lineboil props go out to Guilherme Marcondes, Hornet, and British Gas, for this unique spot where Marcondes stylistic creativity was the driving force in creating an engaging, dreamlike environment with hand-crafted elements – all combined with digitally animated characters that were made to look like photographic cut outs. 

CHI & Partners oversaw the creative on the piece, while Michael Luzzi and Jerry Liu chipped in on the animation front. Also check out Guilherme’s Flickr page, where he posted some behind the scenes photos of the hand crafted set.  Pretty sweet.  Additional credits can be find found here.

Director Peter Sluszka added a new dimension to the popular Sims world in a new TV spot titled Secret World. Working out of Hornet Inc, Sluszka employed a mixed media approach to bring the video game into our own world via a young boy’s imagination. Matt Somma and Kevin Coyle handled the stop-motion animation, while Wieden + Kennedy initiated the creative effort for game giant Electronic Arts.

In mid-2007, Hornet Inc signed Yves Geleyn to their illustrious director roster. We’re now starting to see what he’s been up to since he joined the squad. This week, Hornet posted this Lexus spot below titled Bow Farm, which was creatively overseen by Team One Advertising. The piece was inspired by Charley Harper‘s seminal design work that continues to reverbirate throught the animation world.