Polar bears suffer brutal deaths in tough new climate change campaign by Mother

LONDON, November 20, 2009 - The brutal impact the global warming is having on the polar ice caps is illustrated in a shocking new ad created by Mother and directed by Daniel Kleinman on behalf of the climate change charity Plane Stupid.

The ad was made on a shoestring using a volunteer crew. It opens on a shot of a city skyline, where some strange objects can be seen falling from the sky. Gradually the viewer is able to see that the objects are, in fact, polar bears. As the ad continues, the bears meet their brutal deaths, crashing against buildings, leaving a trail of blood, and landing on cars.

The aim of the campaign is to make people consider the impact that taking even short flights can have on carbon emissions. It was inspired by the fact that an average European flight produces 400kg of carbon, which is the same weight as an average female polar bear.

MPC created the computer-generated polar bears, using proprietary tools including PAPI which simulates falling and collisions in a realistic way. Its proprietary fur software ‘Furtility’ allowed the fur making it move in a lifelike way.

Robert Saville, Creative Partner at Mother, said: "We wanted to confront people with the impact that short-haul flights have on the climate. We used polar bears because they are a well understood symbol of the effect that climate change is having on the natural world."

A spokesperson for Plane Stupid, said: "As a grassroots organisation that campaigns to end short-haul flights, this ad is just the kind of hard-hitting message we need to get people to stop and think before they book their next city break without understanding the consequences."

Director Daniel Kleinman worked around other other jobs in order to make the film for as little money as possible, shooting backgrounds in lunch breaks and assembling the volunteer crew. Kleinman said: "We sourced all the polar bears in Wardour Street in London, they live in a virtual zoo at MPC. No bear was alive when we dropped them from a great height and no pixels were hurt during filming. We did have to mop up the blood though."

Jake Mengers, VFX supervisor at MPC, said: "The sequence used computer-generated 'rag dolls' which emulate the actual skeletal structure of bears, once they were falling as we wanted them to, the computer-generated 'puppets' were overlaid with hand animation to allow us to refine their anatomy, tweaking subtleties to make their movements more believable and using nCloth simulation to make the flesh wobble on impact."

The 40-second ad breaks across UK cinemas and online starting this Friday 20th November 2009, with media through DCM. The ad has a 15 certificate.