Fox Nfl Puppets on the Road Again
In their previous lives as New Orleans musicians, Theresa Andersson and Arthur Mintz never made it to the Super Bowl.
But come Sunday, their "music," in a different medium, will.
As co-founders of Swaybox Studios, they and their partners have spent nine years quietly pioneering and patenting a new, high-tech synthesis of puppetry and animation for TV and film.
The NFL took notice and commissioned Swaybox for "Bring Down the House," a two-minute commercial scheduled to air right before the Super Bowl halftime show.
In the clip, puppet likenesses of actual NFL stars, fabricated and filmed at Swaybox's 17,000-square-foot workshop in Elmwood, come to life. Peyton Manning and Michael Strahan, among others, recorded dialogue for their puppet doppelgangers.
A high-tech puppet version of football player Marshawn Lynch, created by the New Orleans-based Swaybox Studios for an NFL commercial to air during the Super Bowl LVI broadcast on Sunday, Feb. 13, 2022.
The NFL's Super Bowl commercial will give tens of millions of viewers their first glimpse of arguably the most significant advance in onscreen puppetry since Jim Henson's Muppets.
And Swaybox is just getting started.
The studio has two feature-length films and a TV series in development, each with a multi-million-dollar budget. As those projects ramp up this year, the company plans to expand from 40 employees to 200 and move into a much larger, 75,000-square-foot space in Elmwood.
Swaybox won't be a secret much longer.
"We have enjoyed being in a bubble for nine years," Andersson said. "Coming from always dealing with the public (as musicians), it's been a nice reprieve to be able to just be internal and air this stuff out.
"But Sunday, that bubble will burst."
Music to puppetry
Originally from Sweden, violinist, singer and songwriter Theresa Andersson landed in New Orleans in 1990. Her musical career culminated with her acclaimed 2008 album "Hummingbird, Go!" and her innovative one-woman show, in which she used loops and pedals to recreate a full band onstage.
Mintz, son of the late businessman and New Orleans mayoral candidate Donald Mintz, applied his frenetic drumming style to the pop-rock band World Leader Pretend. The band released "Punches" via Warner Bros. Records in June 2005, then broke up before finishing another album.
"It was really fun while it lasted," Mintz said. "It was also really tough. I'm not the kind of person that does well sitting in a van nine hours a day."
Brooke Howell, a fabricator with Swaybox Studios in Elmwood, paints on a tiny football that was used in the production of a commercial starring puppet versions of NFL players, coaches, and officials that will appear in this Sunday's Super Bowl LVI broadcast.
He subsequently went on the road with Andersson as her sound man and director. He also pursued another passion: puppetry. A self-proclaimed "puppet dork," his first job out of college was working on the stop-motion movie "James and the Giant Peach."
In 2010, he directed an elaborate, interactive production of "The Fantastic Mr. Fox" at the Contemporary Arts Center. Audience members crawled through a warren of cardboard tunnels to "underground" rooms where the puppet characters performed in costumes sewn by Andersson.
In 2011, the Shreveport animation studio Moonbot and the Shreveport Arts Council invited Mintz to mount a "Fantastic Mr. Fox" production there. So he and Andersson, by then married, moved to north Louisiana two weeks after their daughter was born.
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While auditioning cast members, Mintz met Chris Armand, a skateboarder originally from Alexandria. Armand signed on as a "Fox" narrator. He also suggested Noah Scruggs, a skateboarding pal and animation fan, might make a good puppeteer.
"In the first 10 seconds, I knew Noah was the best puppeteer I'd ever seen," Mintz said. "It was like watching Mike Tyson box when he was 11."
Scruggs and Armand brought in another skateboarder, Thomas Woodruff, who also became a "Fantastic Mr. Fox" puppeteer. All three had previous experience in filmmaking, but not puppetry.
William Baddour, left, and Brooke Howell, fabricators at Swaybox Studios in Elmwood, paint tiny footballs used in the production of a commercial featuring puppet recreations of NFL players, coaches, and officials that will appear in this Sunday's Super Bowl LVI broadcast.
"Noah, Chris and I didn't grow up being into puppets," Woodruff said. "But this is such a radical form of puppetry, it's not traditional in any sense. When you see the finished product, it's, 'Whoa. That's pretty cool.'"
How the magic is made
Mintz, Andersson, Scruggs, Armand and Woodruff spent nights dreaming up ways to make puppets more lifelike on camera. They shot short films – including a scene from the movie "Ordinary People" recreated with puppets – to test ideas and attract investors.
"The breakthroughs happened really gradually," Mintz said. "You know the Infinite Monkey Theorem, where if you put a bunch of monkeys in a room with typewriters long enough, they'll eventually type sentences that make sense? We're living proof of that."
Their respective backgrounds in music and skateboarding served their new endeavor well. Skateboarding requires coordination and repetition. So does "walking" a puppet through a scene.
Mintz recalled one scene where Armand, Scruggs and Woodruff "did the same walk for 14 hours a day for three days straight. They had that ethos from skateboarding of doing things over and over again. That's a skill set in itself."
A paint sampling of skin, lip, and brow colors used for puppets depicting NFL athletes, coaches, and officials created by Swaybox Studios in Elmwood for an NFL commercial to air during Super Bowl LVI.
Puppets are filmed on real sets, not computer-generated backgrounds. If a scene involves a pool, puppeteers submerge themselves to "swim" the puppets.
"That was a huge breakthrough – getting real puppets under real water with real light hitting them," Armand said. "That separated us immediately."
The puppeteers are digitally erased as the carefully synchronized shots are blended via Swaybox's proprietary compositing technology, for which they hold multiple patents. The process is similar to multi-tracking in music, in which instruments are recorded individually, then mixed together. (That's one reason, Mintz theorizes, why musicians make good puppeteers.)
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The puppet's animatronic faces are as expressive as an animated character's, but also three-dimensional. And filming is faster and more cost-effective than animating an entire movie.
In the final, multi-layered and blended footage, puppets move fluidly through a real environment, more fully "alive" than in stop-motion animation.
'This is my music now'
The partners incorporated Swaybox Studios in Shreveport in 2013. Investors – first family and friends, then angel investors – funded the company's early development.
By January 2014, Andersson had quit touring as a musician to focus on Swaybox fulltime. The last major show she and Mintz played was at the 2014 New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival ahead of Christina Aguilera.
"That feels like a different lifetime," Andersson said. "It took a while to let go of it. When Allen Toussaint texted me one day and said, 'Hey, I heard you stopped playing music,' I got really upset.
Theresa Andersson performs at the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival's Gentilly Stage on Thursday, May 2, 2013.
"What I accomplished with the one-woman show really hit the bucket list for me. I got to play with heroes of mine and achieved a level of musicality, writing, producing and touring that was very fulfilling. But it was a good time to go into a different phase of life, especially having a daughter and not wanting the family to be apart."
She still sings occasionally, but "my fulltime commitment is to Swaybox. This is my music now."
Making this new "music" wasn't always easy.
"If I had known 10 years ago what we had to go through to get to where we are today….it's been brutal," Andersson said. "But it's like giving birth. You forget about it. You don't feel the pain after it's gone. You just see the beauty in front of you. That's where we are now."
The NFL comes calling
In 2018, Swaybox relocated to New Orleans. As the company grew, it needed to draw from a larger talent pool. And it's easier to get top talent from elsewhere to come to New Orleans than Shreveport.
After a reel showcasing Swaybox's capabilities circulated in Hollywood, directors, producers and major studios started calling. That led to production deals with two studios.
Swaybox's main strategy is to develop its own intellectual property rather than be a studio-for-hire.
But they made an exception for the NFL.
The league's chief marketing officer, Tim Ellis, who has ties to New Orleans, and the advertising agency 72andSunny apparently believed Swaybox's futuristic technology would reflect positively on the NFL.
Mintz, Andersson and their 10-year-old daughter were visiting family in Sweden last August when the NFL reached out. The trip immediately pivoted to a working vacation: "Family by day, budgets by night," Andersson said.
The NFL envisioned a sequel to its popular 2019 Super Bowl commercial, "The 100-Year Game," in which football legends at a black-tie banquet break into an impromptu, full-contact battle royale.
The new "Bring Down the House" commercial starts with two kids playing a football-themed video game. The players, as rendered by Swaybox, burst through the screen, and chaos ensues.
Mintz and the Swaybox team worked closely with director Peter Berg, whose credits include the "Friday Night Lights" movie and TV series and the New Orleans-shot "Deepwater Horizon," to storyboard the commercial. Daily Zoom calls with a dozen or more NFL executives became the norm. Discussions delved into such minutiae as the thread used for the puppet players' uniforms.
The principal team at Swaybox Studios includes, clockwise from top left, Noah Scruggs, Arthur Mintz, Thomas Woodruff, Theresa Andersson and Chris Armand. They pose on a set built in the company's Elmwood headquarters for an NFL Super Bowl commercial. Photographed on Monday, February 7, 2022.
Scenes with actual humans were shot in a Los Angeles living room. The room was recreated in Swaybox's Elmwood studio to film the puppets. To maintain continuity, the same white couch was flown back and forth from New Orleans to Los Angeles.
The Swaybox staff worked on the commercial through the Christmas holidays. A final, two-week push of 19-hour days culminated in a 26-hour marathon that concluded as the sun came up last Sunday. More last-minute changes were made this week.
Days before the commercial's debut, disembodied silicon and plaster heads with famous NFL faces were still stacked on a table in the Elmwood workshop. Nearby was a color palette listing the individual puppets' skin, lip and brow tones.
Andersson likens the dozens of Swaybox employees – fabricators, painters, digital artists, office staff, etc. – to a family. They all helped push the company to this pivotal point. "A lot of hands have touched this," she said.
They're excited, if a bit nervous, about the Super Bowl broadcast. They'll be watching Sunday as the world sees their handiwork for the first time.
"We've had a lot of time to figure things out," Armand said. "It's like bamboo that has been growing really strong underground and then it comes up really fast.
"That's what we've been doing for nine years: growing. And now we're finally emerging."
Source: https://www.nola.com/entertainment_life/keith_spera/article_9edcc928-89c0-11ec-9738-c75f86d139a6.html
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