Loco Motion

For Jeff Jackett, the marketing manager for Gatorade at Pepsi-QTG Canada at the time, the ad works because it is so dense, so heavily layered with imagery and ideas. "In today's media," he says, "where a lot of folks take content and view it online, then have the ability to pause and rewind, this richness of content, the eye candy in every frame, really encourages that viewer." In other words, it's the sort of material that naturally moves from TV to the Web. There, obsessive fans can pore over the details, the Gatorade logo burning into their retinas all the while.

But Motion Theory is about more than visual effects. For Cullen, it's a whole new way of thinking. "It's also editing, animation, the way people build sets and score music--it comes from graphic design," he says. "When you edit, it's the way you transition from one scene to the next, the way you incorporate type--these things are just beginning to make their way into films and TV shows." As a self-styled "microstudio," built on the old Hollywood model, Motion Theory is constructed differently from traditional production companies, which conceive each project around an A-list director, then bring in talent as needed during each stage of production. Instead, Motion Theory pools everyone under one roof: writers, artists, visual-effects people, animators, programmers, designers, and directors. Effects people and designers don't simply come in at the end of the process to execute someone else's idea--they help visualize the project from the outset. And while Motion Theory is outfitted with many of the standard tools used by movie studios and visual-effects companies, it also writes proprietary code to do what it can't accomplish with off-the-shelf software. "The advantage," Jimenez says, "is that we basically have an R&D team, so we're developing ideas during our free time, which a normal production company wouldn't have the ability to do."

That inventiveness explains Motion Theory's ability to create utterly novel effects. In its video for Beck's "Girl," the singer strolls around East L.A. while live-action streetscapes magically collapse in on themselves--a trick inspired by Al Jaffee's fold-ins from Mad magazine. When Beck reaches for pills in a drugstore, the shelves spontaneously merge to reveal the words side effects: death. A mural that reads beauty and grooming supplies implodes to become beauty lies. Throughout the video, more sinister truths "unfold," a concept that parallels the song, whose upbeat tune masks its dark lyrics. "I look at things structurally," Cullen says. "The foundation of the work we do is the understanding of visual syntax, the relationship of objects to each other." The video is an exercise in geometrical precision, solving the technical challenge of reengineering real-world locations with elaborate camera and computer tricks. While the footage of Beck sauntering around East L.A. was done documentary-style, with a handheld camera, Motion Theory used motion-control photography and computer graphics to create the illusion of, say, a wall as it reconfigures itself. To crank up the photorealism of the digital effects created for the fold-ins, they added layers of textures and materials shot in live-action, followed by another overlay of digital effects--falling dirt, candy exploding out of a piñata--to make them even more convincing.

Chris Carbone, an analyst with Social Technologies, thinks the visual-effects trend is about ratcheting up expectations. "Younger consumers--digital natives--grew up in a world where their baseline was The Matrix, The Lord of the Rings, and SpiderMan," he says. "But now that world-class effects are the standard, visuals need to be integrated in the message even more than in the past, and that's true of movies or marketing."

That line of reasoning led HP to Motion Theory's door in 2006. David Roman, worldwide vice president of marketing communications for HP's Personal Systems Group, had come on board in 2005 while the company was struggling, post-Compaq merger, to better compete with Dell. Roman wanted to create a global campaign to attract a younger demographic. Goodby, Silverstein & Partners developed the idea of a series of spots in which celebrities were seen from the neck down, using only their voices and hands to communicate how they use their PCs. Motion Theory produced the first "Hands" spot for HP's global "Personal Again" campaign and eventually three others.