Home / Shorts / Prodigy Films Target Spot
August 2, 2009 by John Dickinson  | 287 views | Comments (7)

Prodigy Films recently completed this lovely stop-animation spot for Target that looks to be inspired by the Oren Lavie animation. The colors and spaciousness stand it apart.

7 Responses to this post
  • mbike
    August 3, 2009 at 7:19 am | Reply

    Bit like this from Blink/Mankovsky, too. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uVaL9gCTqY0&eurl

  • jason
    August 3, 2009 at 12:40 pm | Reply

    i saw the oren lavie video about a month ago and loved it a lot. i wouldn’t say that this target spot is as much inspired by but rather ripped off from the oren lavie video. it brings a tear to my eye that there are people/companies out there who can do nothing original and feel they have to emulate other things that are cool and popular and then succeed at it.

    • John Dickinson
      August 3, 2009 at 1:55 pm | Reply

      A valid point for discussion. Keep in mind that sometimes clients approach designers with very specific ideas of what they want too.

  • William
    August 5, 2009 at 9:40 am | Reply

    I respectfully submit the following to this discussion. Would anyone agree that at a certain point a technique passes from the realm of originality and becomes a trope whose value is eventually seen only through variation?

    In other words, if two or three designers copy an idea, it is a rip-off. But if, over five years, thousands of designers adopt, adapt, and alter the concept, giving birth to countless diversification of the initial concept, has the idea now entered into our collective visual language and become a legitimate part of our vocabulary?

    A super-simplified example:

    Were early cinematic adopters who included lens flares as an aesthetic choice (as opposed to simple mistakes) considered to be copying the cinematographers before them who initially decided to do so?
    I realize this is not as specific as the spots in question.

    The same with Bullet Time? What’s the relationship between the work of John Gaeta (Bullet Time), Dayton Taylor (TimeTrack), and Tim Macmillan (time slice)? Did they not each build on the work of the other?

    If I use Legos to make a stop-motion music video, am I ripping off Michel Gondry?

    Where’s the threshold?

    • John Dickinson
      August 5, 2009 at 3:29 pm | Reply

      Great questions William. I think the more obvious and original the look, the more obvious the copy (homage?) will appear. If the look gets copied too much then it falls into the realm of cliché. Also, taking inspiration from a very recent original style is always going to be judged severely by some.

      • Stephen
        August 7, 2009 at 4:23 am | Reply

        I don’t have any objections to re-using the pixilation/bedsheets technique, but for me there are three elements that take it over the line from “inspiration” to “rip off”:

        - starts and ends female asleep in bed
        - starts with a female, has male and female together half way through, female alone again at the end
        - includes the “fish” sequence

        Plus, of course, having a very similar-looking female protagonist doesn’t help!

        The Blink/Mankovsky video is far more distinct and clearly derives from an original idea even if the animation techniques are similar.

  • Stefan
    August 8, 2009 at 4:28 pm | Reply

    Hi over there,

    in the last days people often talked about this type of stop motion.
    This technique already appeared in a musicvideo of the year 2001:
    “Peter Licht – Die transsylvanische Verwandte” (see on youtube)…

    Greetings from here to there…
    Stefan


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