Tom & Mark: “Muffin Man”

Tom and Mark (Nexus Productions) have outdone themselves with “Muffin Man,” a new spot for the recently rebranded Royal Bank of Canada. Although the spot is entirely CG, it captures the retro charm of claymation through its textures, colors and reduced frame rate.

This is one of those spots that’s pure fun to watch again and again. (It works well backwards, too.) I’m especially fond of the way it ends: increasingly baroque scenes of progress and complexity give way to the simplicity of Mr. Muffin himself, happily finishing up a business call while munching on the pastry that started it all. Brilliant.


Title: Muffin Man
Length: 1×60″
Director: Tom & Mark Perrett

CLIENT
Client: Royal Bank of Canada

AGENCY
Agency: BBDO Toronto
Agency Producer: Beatrice Bodogh, Tracey Azzopardy
V.P Group Creative Director: Ian MacKellar
Creative Director: Carlos Moreno
Creative Director: Peter Ignazi

PRODUCTION and ANIMATION
Production Company: Nexus Productions
Directors: Tom and Mark Perrett
Producer: Melody Sylvester
Production Manager: Nathalie Le Berre
Animation and Post-Production: Nexus Productions

MUSIC AND SOUND DESIGN
Music: Brains & Hunch
Sound Design: Brains & Hunch

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About the author

Justin Cone

/ justincone.com
Together with Carlos El Asmar, Justin co-founded Motionographer, F5 and The Motion Awards. He currently lives in Austin, Texas with is wife, son and fluffball of a dog. Before taking on Motionographer full-time, Justin worked in various capacities at Psyop, NBC-Universal, Apple, Adobe and SCAD.

26 Comments

Stephen

Beautiful. Flawlessly executed.

JP

This is great. Love the simplicity of the character design too.

monovich

What a fantastic piece. the CG claymation look gets a +10 for nostalgia points. Makes me feel like a kid.

Justyot

Amazing! The textures, the colours, the sights and sounds. Wowwaweewa. It’s like the 70’s and everybody is pressuring my dad to do acid again.

oeuf

Very nice work. Reminiscent of old Aardman stuff. Alot of nice details that warrant multiple views.

Ara

smart.

Simon Robson

Tom & Mark’s best work to date I reckon…

Ian

Incredibly good. Watched it several times, and will continue to do so. Flawless.

Paul

BOING!

awesome

Petja

Excellent work! Feels so magical..
So they turned the lovely park into a mall… interesting..

tomorrowisclosed

a bank ad that leaves you smiling! lordy

MA

Warm & tingly. Love it.

dex

very impressive!

sting_is_gay

beautiful animation, but what about the content? dark underlying issues here: borrow lots of money, build and expand over green space, increase obesity in kids and turn into a fat rich businessman yourself. and keep building and expanding. maybe in the last frame that whispering money lender should choke on his muffin…

muffinz

Seriously! The banker whispering in his ear is like slugworth from willy wonka. The animation is great but man he seemed like such a nice muffin man at the beginning and became a sleazy cell phone totting business man at the end. I hope all the muffin mans watching don’t sell out like this poor little one did. I mean a franchise in a mall? This is like a prequel to Wall-E

top_o_the

You guys are right…. the whisper is dark indeed.

boca

Haha! Nice conspiracy theory muffinz! :-D

Justyot

Ummm… it’s a commercial for a BANK. They lend money to help your business prosper. The spot is… well, spot on.

tod

awesome!

Andy

Same team who did the Coke Unity Olympics spot apparently… you can’t accuse them of being a one trick pony.

boca

Wicked! I love the sort of “Eames Powers of 10” approach to it, very effective! 5 stars fo sho!

krpdesign

What codec is this in? Suddenly lots of videos aren’t playing for me, and come up with a question mark over the Quicktime Q.

justin

It’s in Sorenson 3 with AAC audio. Should be playable with QT 7.

Have you recently installed any other codecs?

Comments are closed.