Friday, May 31, 2019

Major Southeast Auto Dealer casts Tom Clifford as the voice of their TV Story Book Character

Fantastic Plastic Video & Film Production for a major Auto Group in the Southeast has chosen Tom Clifford as their character voice for their new TV ad campaign. Much like that of Winnie-the-Pooh, Tom conveys the warm & fuzzy sound of a mythic story-teller. He walks us through in rhythmic rhyme as the story unfolds with the turning of pages. This was a great vehicle for our character talents to shine.




Did our homework on the voice to the degree that I know Sterling Holloway's interpretation of 'Pooh' is somewhat different than today's - Christopher Robin's 'Pooh' which sounds a bit British. I auditioned using copy from Dr. Seuss' "Sam-I-am" . They wanted that same cadence. Came out where we split some hairs and developed a unique voice for the client's new character. Fantastic Plastic relayed the client's reaction to the finished spot:
"The client is ecstatic at the results, already talking sequel." 

There's nothing more satisfying for an actor to learn that their homework paid off with an "extremely happy client".  Equally important is knowing that as part of a collaborative effort of art and scripting, I was able to bring their vision to life. Hopefully, there will be 'life' after this initial concept.




Here's an excerpt from Fantastic Plastic's 'profile' page regarding the overall concept to final production of the Story-Book approach:



We're pretty happy that we were able to turn this around from concept to delivery in about three or four days.

First, Honda ad guru Ben Boles (who we think pretty darn highly of), floated the Seuss idea as something his Big Boss wanted to try. At that point it was pretty much just "One car, two car," and not much more. 
We jumped on it and the creative director wrote the script, and made arrangements with the artist to create all the illustrations. Before the drawings were even started, the editor began creating the book animation just with blank pages.

While the artist was at work, we hit up voice actor Tom Clifford (who can impersonate darn near anyone) to see if he could do a voice reminiscent of the late great Sterling Holloway. Surely enough, he could. Then  spent a day coloring the drawings like a madman, and putting it all together.

Fairly frantic days, extremely happy client. That's a good combo.
 

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