NEW YORK CITY - Furry Puppet Studio (www.furrypuppet.com) recently teamed up with the Utah Office of Tourism to help make sure visitors to the state make it home safely.
The Utah Office of Tourism's “Adventure Safe” campaign (adventuresafe.org) features Frank and Morris, a pair of vultures who genuinely want visitors to stay safe - but would understand if they didn't. The duo offer outdoor safety advice, which includes bringing water, checking conditions, staying on trails and sharing details on where you're going. Love Communications conceived the campaign, whose spokes-birds were created by Furry Puppet Studio, led by founder and creative director Zack Buchman.
"The brief was a fun contradiction," Buchman shares. "These are vultures giving you sincere safety tips, and the joke only lands if they feel warm and likeable, rather than creepy. So the question became, 'How do you make a vulture you actually want to listen to?'"
The puppets had to be likable, while still reflecting attributes of real vultures, which tend to be patchy, hunched and a little grim.
"We patterned the forms in foam, then spent the real time refining the expressions," he notes. "We process a lot of our own textiles, so we could push the texture until each bird looked scruffy, but still like someone you would take directions from. Get it wrong and a vulture just reads as roadkill."
Production was handled by Redman Movies & Stories, with Michael Kern directing, Tommy Chandler producing and Ryan Gass serving as director of photography. Editorial and compositing stayed close to the production team, handled by Nathan Solomon and Ryan Gass, with music by Randall Pinson.
On the agency side, Love Communications creative director J. Comstock oversaw the campaign, with Lindsay D'Alessandro producing. For Buchman, the hook was the same thing that makes the campaign work.
"A safety message is the easiest thing in the world to tune out," he says. "And it can have life or death consequences. We wanted people to pay attention and remember what the vultures were saying."