2012 began with an interesting variety of projects. For Cici’s Pizza, we created two different Pig character puppets to promote their “Hog Wild” pizza campaign. For The Amazing Race, we created twelve Travelocity Gnomes, all in safe soft foam, weighted and rigged with skid plates to work on an ice playing field as pucks for the sport of Curling; for the California Almond Growers Association we created a soft Heart Costume to dramatize how healthy almonds are for you; we created the prize for a new ESPN contest - a new, personalized, giant Mascot Head of the winner; we also created new Mannequin Heads and Peel away Masks for Mercedes.
RIF, the “Reading Is Fundamental” program, put out a musical message using singing fairy tale characters to encourage kids and parents about the value of reading books - our animatronic Poppa Bear drives a boat while singing and our Big Bad Wolf drives around in a sports car singing with Little Red Riding Hood.
We are still traveling with our work quite a bit too- we packed our fullsize White Rhino costume and animatronics equipment and drove it off to Arizona to participate in a Canadian Railway Union Show; and we also got to travel to Korea with our animatronic Polar Bear, to represent new products for Daelim.
DISH network has come out with an amazing new device called a Hopper, and with a name like that, what would be the most appropriate symbol? That’s right- they hired us to create an ultra-realistic, animatronic Kangaroo costume, and we got to fly out to New York to film the commercial.
For StubHub has come up with a brilliant idea to advertise their great ticket service- a wild tree character that has tickets instead of leaves, and it gives us all great tickets to our favorite shows. We were hired on to design and create the Ticket Oak character, with a huge animatronic puppet face on the trunk and a gigantic treetop canopy of over ten thousand tickets in place of leaves. Our StubHub Ticket Oak has become such a popular character, he has already been invited back for a second set of commercials this year. For his rapidly growing multitude of fans, we also staged a special appearance day at The Grove with the whole Ticket Oak puppet assembled and performing all day.
For a new Pepto Bismol commercial campaign, we created ‘Walter’, our Squirrel Puppet to demonstrate not only how effective they are, but also how conveniently pocket sized they are. Our Squirrel puppet pops out of a medicine cabinet built into a tree out in a campground, and surprises a camper with the solution to his stomach ache.We created some Giant Venus Flytrap puppets for a Great Clips commercial where and unfortunate golfer gets swallowed up by one of our Giant Venus Flytraps, leaving his golf buddies to ponder how to extract him.