The making of Brut

Vijaya Cherian goes beind the scenes to see how the Brut TVC was developed by Muddville.

While the Middle East is becoming increasingly well known among filmmakers for its exotic locales, seldom have we seen international players looking to the region’s production and post production facilities to produce high-quality commercials for worldwide audiences.

Recently, however, Muddville, a post production house based in Dubai Studio City has been gaining a reputation for producing more commercials for international markets than those in the region. Muddville’s most recent project was a commercial produced for Brut deodrant and commissioned by an Australian client.

The storyline follows the average day of Bruce Root, a robot who collects items that are not cool enough and converts them into an item reflecting every man’s fantasy — before they’re placed into the Brutaliser, a machine. A can is made into a liquid keg, a bicycle into a motorbike and a Barbie doll into a real live model. The Brutaliser then converts all these specially selected items and magically converts them into the final product – a can of Brut!

“The storyboard was presented to us by a client in Australia; we jumped at the opportunity to push our boundaries,” says Jacques Mulder, director and owner of Muddville. “This concept was a lot bigger and more complicated from a technical point of view than anything previously worked on by Muddville.”

Once the storyboard was provided, each person at Muddville had his work cut out for him.

For Anton Swanepoel, lead modeler at Muddville, the challenge was to create a robot with gears, mechanisms and pistons that simulated real life robotic characteristics.

“Our team watched Iron Man at least 20 times to understand the level of detail that would be required and spent days researching robotic options,” explains Mulder.

For animation and rigging, it was character animator, George Cristocopolous’s turn to simulate the character and give it life.

“If his head were to move, the pistons would react; if the head rotated, the mechanisms would be scripted in such a way that secondary animations would not be needed as it would all be automatic. This was truly a challenge – one that we addressed well,” explains Mulder.

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