Robert Abel and Associate's "Brilliance" ad is such a beguiling little oddity - a colourful, striking, cutting-edge slice of visual glory touting the virtues of just about the dullest, most nondescript product conceivable. The company, led by its founder, visual effects pioneer Robert Abel, were hired by Ketchum Advertising in 1984 to develop a thirty-second spot for the Canned Food Information Council; the aim was for it to be so startlingly futuristic that it would completely demolish canned food's popular image as an archaic and inferior culinary product. As a result, canned food is here not only pitched as the lifeblood of future generations who are busy colonising Jupiter, it's sexy too. Abel has you so enthralled with the aesthetic charms of that saucy robot (whose cues were taken from the work of science fiction illustrator Chris Moore) that you don't really mind that you don't get a close or accurate peak at the contents of those cans (or question why a Jupiter-faring robot would be sitting down to a candlelit dinner of Earth-grown human food in the first place. Would a robot's body actually be built for the consumption and digestion of regular meals? Would it even have a sense of taste?)
"Brilliance" allegedly aired only once, during Super Bowl XIX on 20th January 1985, and went on to become the toast of that year's selection of ads (meanwhile, the most hotly anticipated ad of the lot, "Lemmings", Apple's attempt to follow up on the previous year's bit of Orwell-inspired genius, left viewers in a stunned and uneasy silence). CGI has come on leaps and bounds since 1985, so it's easy to scoff at how comparatively primitive "Brilliance" looks now, yet every time I watch this ad I find myself in awe at just how gorgeously sleek that robot looks, and at how wonderfully, fluidly human those movements of hers still are (and yet so beautifully inhuman at the same time). The pioneering techniques used to bring the robot to life and imbue her with all that character were revolutionary for their day, and involved filming a live actress in a swivel chair and having a computer track reference points on her body to convert her movements into animation (see the "making of" video below). All you fans of what CGI has since achieved have Robert Abel and Associates to thank for pushing the envelope so much with the ads they worked on. And Ketchum Advertising/the Canned Food Information Council, for supplying the funding which made their research possible in the first place.
Despite Abel's best efforts, I think there are limits to just how chic or alluring you can make canned food appear. The culinary snob in me finds the whole notion of a future where we're living out on Jupiter with our sexy robot companions and gravity-defying tableware to be a whisker less magical if it involves subsisting on a diet of canned asparagus. But damn, what an absolute class act of an ad.
PS: The next Super Bowl ad I'll cover here will be none other than "Lemmings"! Assuming I can get myself into a sadomasochistic enough frame of mind, that is.
Thank you for sharing ;-) When i was a starving artist back in the late 80s, my boss had the iconic book "Sexy Robot" by Sorayama, which helped propel these classic metallic bots to more & more artists/illustrators. In those days, i was getting my 1st experience working w/ real CG apps (some early 3d anim software called Crystal Topaz), which *actually ran on PC's*---yes, 286's & 386's with old ATT "Targa" video cards--some of the 1st 16 & later 32 (well 24) bit video cards for PCs--a big deal considering how, in those days, it was rare for any small/PC based studio to be able to produce CG, as the hi-end 3d was primarily being done by leaders like Robert Abel [in ur article here] and other specialized studios on huge multi-million dollar workstations, etc...ahhh the good old dayz.
ReplyDelete> Thanx again, Robert Mykoff
No problem, I really love the work of the early CGI pioneers. :)
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