For the latest installment of their long-running ‘Epic’ campaign, MoneySuperMarket brought to life Action Man - Britain’s favourite action figure - in glorious stop motion. The 60-second film sees the tiny soldier save money on his tank insurance and feel so epic that he abandons his post and - along with dozens of his comrades - performs a euphoric dance number across the desert warzone to Cece Peniston’s Finally. The script culminates in epic fashion, with our hero tearing his clothes off and continuing the dance in his iconic built-in blue underpants.

The Stop Frame animation process took 10 days to shoot 60” worth of footage that included challenging camera moves, moving vehicles and dancing action figures. Culminating in a complex final scene with 28 figurines simultaneously dancing. To make the doll look as everyone remembered him we had to completely remake it with wires and fixings inside him so that he could hold dance moves. All the clothes had to be reinforced and stiffened so they wouldn’t boil and crease under the light. Finally the desert landscapes were painstakingly created with thousands of hand-painted poly rocks and matt painted backgrounds.

CG Face animation and lip sync

The brief was that Action Man needed to lip sync to the VO as well as have subtle facial animation. Due to a tight schedule it was not possible to achieve this in camera so it had to be done in post.

The explosions were added in comp and had to look like they were animated in camera. This required layering up stock footage and effects and R&D to ensure it worked with the stop motion footage.

Because of the scale of the sets the backgrounds are digital matte paintings which were added during post. They had to match the set and look natural as it was shot in camera which required a lot of skill.

The scale of what is being shot should never compromise the aesthetics of the cinematography. Tristrams aim is always to create something beautiful and appropriate to the scene. Shooting miniatures does bring some challenges however, especially regarding depth of field. When one is working at the limits of minimum focus, it can be hard to hold focus even between quite closely placed objects. Wide lenses and very tight fstops can help alleviate this problem. Also, in animation the proximity of the camera can hinder access to the animator and relative to the puppets the camera is the size of a small car so moving it in limited space can be challenging.

For Action Man, the main problem was his very shiny plastic flesh which was highly reflective so we used a lot of polarisers to help that out!