Two recent VCU Brandcenter graduates have created a powerful national ad for People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), which stresses the use of computer-generated imagery (CGI) instead of real animals when it comes to film, tv shows and the like.
Two recent VCU Brandcenter graduates have created a powerful national ad for People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), which stresses the use of computer-generated imagery (CGI) instead of real animals when it comes to film, tv shows and the like.
Michael Stango and Jonathan Hirsch just graduated last month and already have some serious material to ad to their resumes. The two started on the campaign in October as part of their portfolio development class at the Brandcenter.
“Our teacher at the time was working at The Martin Agency and over the years {had} become friends with Dan Mathews {Senior Vice President of Campaigns} from PETA, and Dan brought Mike {Lear} this brief for PETA and he thought it’d be good to bring to the class.”
With the help of Lear, who now works for South Carolina-based Erwin Penland ad agency, and New York-based CGI company Hey Beautiful Jerk, the team was able to create an effective ad for PETA.
Displaying a chimpanzee with his arms bound behind his back with film strip, the tagline reads, “Some Shows Hold More Than An Audience Captive”.
The ad specifically targets the show Zoo on CBS for using real animals instead of CGI with the tagline, “Use CGI to Free All Animals From ‘Zoo'”.
Zoo, now in its second season, will premiere on CBS June 30. The drama stars James Wolk as Jackson Oz, an American zoologist who oversees safaris in Africa. The show centers around Oz investigating a series of animal attacks on humans that begin occurring all over the world.
PETA met with CBS executives last year over their use of wolves, baboons, big cats and a bear in the series.
“If Darren Aronofsky’s Noah and Jon Favreau’s The Jungle Book can create entire realistic animal kingdoms with CGI, then CBS can clearly make its show without exploiting any live animals,” said PETA Senior Vice President {of Communications} Lisa Lange,” in a statement. “PETA is calling on the network to switch entirely to affordable, accessible, humane, and versatile technology—and stop using animals who are caged, whipped, and denied everything that’s natural and important to them.”
Zoo is reportedly planning to use wolves, reindeer, horses, and buffalo in the upcoming season.
Stango said he wanted to be involved with the ad campaign project after doing some research on the treatment of live animals in films.
“After doing some reading about it, it’s really kind of eye-opening to hear how animals are treated on movie sets and stuff like that,” he said. “Seeing how they took the animals, ripped them away from their mothers and stuff, it’s kind of sick and twisted.”
The recent grad said the team went through a couple of ideas before developing the 3-D handcuffed chimp concept for the ad.
“It started out with playing with the idea of having a director shooting an animal in the wild, all the directors and crew would be dressed as hunters but that didn’t feel right so we bounced around the idea of having a chimp in a cage and the bars of the cage made with film strips and that still didn’t feel right and then we just got around to, well what if the monkey was bound by itself?”
The ad rolled out on Tuesday and has run in the Los Angeles Times, New York Times and The Wall Street Journal.
