2007 has begun with animal projects adding new, highly realistic animals to our continually growing collection of high quality animatronic puppets. This year, to celebrate Hertz's partnership with Prius and their new Green program we created two beautiful animatronic Deer and Hare puppets that surprise pedestrians by driving around in a Prius. The Deer puppet was completely green too - completely artificial and containing no real deer elements. As with most all of our furry puppets and costumes, the fine fur was electrostatically flocked on with fine gradations of subtle mixes of hair and the long long fur utilized the best available custom four-way stretch fur, that is custom woven on a computerized loom system.
We shot the puppets in a Prius on green screen in Los Angeles, and for the location part of the shoot, we flew up to Canada, to shoot our Deer and Hare puppets in some of the beautiful parks north of Vancouver.
For a Chantix commercial shot in New York, we matched an existing turtle with an exact replica animatronic Turtle puppet, able to perform moves and directions that the real turtle couldn't. Our existing animatronic animals were also put to work this year for: NB Zips with our Porcupine; Sony Plasma Television with our flying Butterfly puppet, and for a Dos Equis commercial we provided our Seal puppet. We also created an animatronic, walking Teddy Bear puppet for an LG Washers commercial for Korea.
Our custom costuming department has been very productive this year too, continuing in our tradition of creating top quality costumes, like: multiple walkaround mascot Gas Flame suits for the Georgia Gas Company; four walkaround Vegetable suits for Santo Domingo in Puerto Rico; a Mentos Hat, Whip Cream Hats and rhinestone encrusted jewelry for Mentos; and two new alien masks, Glomp and Eelian, for Softbank in Japan. For a new, out-of-this-earth campaign for Regalado department stores, we sent a dozen of our best alien costumes down to Mexico city. And in an edgy new update of Santa Claus' image, we created the mask for Harley Claus in a new commercial for Harley Davidson -with motorcycles pulling his sleigh in place of deer.
Our new makeup work for 2007 includes many Beast makeups for an extensive new campaign for Del Taco commercials; a new alien Hivehead Alien makeup for a Softbank commercial for Japan; some very humorous, wild Beard Growth effects for demented lab technicians at Comcast; and some impressively Bad Teeth and Braces prosthetics for a Carmax commercial.
For Bush Beans, we built a set of Pig Wings, a miniature, detailed Barn, and an Electronic Chili Changer device; for General Mills,we created an entire miniature Cereal Box City; for Popsicle we created the special effect transformation of a superhero into a Hero Sand Sculpture; for the Oregon Lottery we created the object of one winner's wildest fantasy - a Giant Hamburger, carried toward him across a field by five beautiful women in negligés; and we created a computer geek's dream girlfriend, a Sexy Android for a Budweiser commercial.
Wrapping up the year with a challenging ambitious project, we created a series of challenging Flat Body effects for a T-Mobile commercial for Germany, including Deflating Bodies and culminating in a fully furred, practical Deflating Dog special effect.