Loco Motion

In the sculpture garden of New York's Museum of Modern Art, director Mathew Cullen takes in his surroundings, assessing light and shadow. Cullen, cofounder of Motion Theory--the production company behind some of the most remarkable video work around, including Hewlett-Packard's "Hands" spots and the music video for Beck's "Girl"--is tanned, round-faced, cheery. But behind that chipper exterior, a complex apparatus is whirring away. "My father was a mathematician," he says, "so I was always drawn to a visual aesthetic of science and technology and numbers. I try to break things down into visual components." The MoMA shoot is part of an ad for New York's first global marketing campaign; as Cullen and codirector Jesus de Francisco organize their actors in the courtyard, vans packed with camera equipment head across the 59th Street Bridge to collect what seems to be tedious footage of the hazy skyline. Three months later, those bridge shots will emerge as an exploding electro-montage of Manhattan, mixing animation with live-action footage--shape-shifting skyscrapers sprouting trees on rooftops, colossal blood-red pumps sauntering across a busy intersection. It's a pop-up book on steroids.

Cullen and executive producer Javier Jimenez cofounded Motion Theory in 2000. Now it's leading a wave of New York- and L.A.-based companies that are reinventing the TV commercial, even the look of video itself, and changing the way advertisers and other clients connect with the public. Old tagline-driven spots are giving way to content that's at once more visceral and cerebral. Upstart shops such as Brand New School, Psyop, and Logan, which specialize in animation and motion graphics, have embraced a trippy style that draws from cartoons, comic books, and video games--a 2-D aesthetic with occasional live-action footage. More established production companies such as RSA Films, Radical Media, and Anonymous Content make edgy live-action commercials with the same high production values as their film and TV work. But no one blends those worlds better than Motion Theory, with its radically strange hybrid of live action, visual effects, and 3-D animation.

A radically strange hybrid of live action, visual effects, and 3-D animation

By embedding layers of visual texture in its work, Motion Theory has set itself apart, whether in ads for Budweiser, Electronic Arts, and Microsoft, or music videos for the likes of Modest Mouse's "Dashboard." Motion Theory's ad for Reebok's Wrapshear running shoe begins with an urban obstacle course that sprouts from the sneaker, a blend of cartoonish line drawings and live action. The geometry is brilliant: When a runner leaps onto a fire hydrant spouting water left and right, pigeons shoot like fireworks around him, creating first perpendicular and then chaotic movement across the screen. For the return of Sears's decidedly unsexy paper catalog, Motion Theory created a "living" book centered around one dizzying effect, where live-action scenes become catalog pages and vice versa. The viewer watches a young couple's life unfold in a flutter: Walls break apart and flip left; appliances "turn" into newer ones; live action becomes still photography and then comes back to life. If Motion Theory can give Sears some edge, it's doing something right.

A Gatorade ad from last year, directed by Cullen and Grady Hall, is typical of the company's aesthetic. In a style characteristic of what cultural critic Scott Bukatman has called "topsy-turvydom"--the way ornate visual effects can seemingly liberate the viewer from gravity itself--the spot imagines an elaborate system that propels Sidney Crosby, the all-star center for the NHL's Pittsburgh Penguins, as he breaks for the net. After the camera tightens in on Crosby's face, it pans out over the rink, where engineers in a NASA-like nerve center hover over a virtual simulation of the game, orchestrating his moves. Moving inside Crosby, the camera plunges several layers to a grimy, sweaty boiler room under the ice, a Fritz Lang set reimagined by Terry Gilliam--pumps, gauges, men shoveling hockey pucks into a goalie-mask boiler spewing blue flames. Gatorade powers the Stanley Cup pistons that in turn power Crosby. Swooping back up through the layers, the camera pulls out from Crosby's eye and follows the puck into the goal.

Like much of Cullen's directing work, the Gatorade spot is all about patterns; each element of the action becomes a kind of proof. The engineers, for instance, are looking for a calculus, an all-inclusive formula that reveals the perfect strategy and shot. To create the effects, Motion Theory mapped out how the action would look before going into production. Hall's team created elaborate 3-D computer models, then shot the footage and built set pieces or props they could later enhance in 3-D. (They also embedded "Easter eggs" for hard-core Crosby fans: As we fall through to the bowels of the operation, for instance, we catch a glimpse of a creature that's part insect, part appliance--a nod to the fact that as a kid Crosby used to shoot pucks into the dryer in his basement.)