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ESPN Commercials
Several years back in the 90's, ESPN ran a series of commercials advertising Monday night football that featured Coolidge's famous poker dogs. This page provides a little information and pictures on those commercials. You can even see a couple of the commercials by looking at the animal handling company's website (described below).
 Picture of the production set that Animal Makers sent me. |
Before I say more, I would like to thank Animal Makers (the company that helped with the "animal aspect" of this commercial) a LOT Back when I was doing much of my research, I sent letters to basically anyone remotely related to these dogs. I sent them a letter, and they actually responded to me personally and sent a picture of the filming of this commercial. That is more than I ever expected them to do and am much appreciative.
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The company that made the commercials was Click 3X and Animal Makers was responsible for working with the animals. Animal Makers seems to specialize in working with animals on screen. Some information on these commercials and even clips of them are available on their website.
The following is an account of some of the filming of these poker dog commercials based on information that had been previously posted on the companies websites and an article from Post Magazine, but neither of those documents are publicly accessible on their servers anymore.
The commercials were created with a combination of real dogs, animitroinc puppets, and splicing scenes together, and computer morphing. A total of thirteen 30 second commercials were created for this promotion. In these commercials canines sit around a poker table, sometimes with a NFL star, and discus everything from a bulldog's encounter with a car to whether the Tennessee should be allowed to be called the Oilers.
The filming of the commercials was done by director Joe Pytka of Pytka/Venice. Five real dogs were used in the production of these commercials and a special set was constructed which resembled Coolidge's paintings and allowed for the trainers to control the dogs. No "green screens" were used in the shooting either. There were actually dogs sitting around that poker table. The dogs did, however, tend to be older so they were relatively cooperative and stayed put.
The paws that were seen in the commercials holding the cards were not the dogs'. They were animitronic paws either controlled by operators under the table or offscreen. And apparently, the creation of these fake paws was quite an ordeal. There was only 7 days to create these sets of paws for 5 different dogs. And in order to make the paws seamlessly integrate into the commercial, exact measurements were needed for each of the animal actors. Also, at the last minute two of the dogs were changed, and although they were the same species their color did change slightly. Since the commercials were produced though, it looks like all of the paws were created in time.
Unfortunately, dogs can't talk, so the crew had to lipsync over the dogs and make their jaws move properly. To make this process go as quickly and smoothly as possible, the real jaw of the dog was removed (in the film after shooting, there wasn't any dog surgery) and replaced with a simulated jaw and tongue. This allowed for realistic speech movement from the dogs mouth. The fact that the dogs were constantly moving their heads in all kinds of different angles complicated that process. They would need a different jaw to paste in or morph an existing one.
During production the team also paid a lot of attention to the eyes of the dogs. Eyes can play a major role in how someone comes across while acting, so they wanted to make sure that the dogs also conveyed emotion and feeling through their eyes. Since dogs will obey commands to "roll over" and "sit", but not "show more emotion" that emotion had to be added later. "Eye blink, winks, and eyebrow movements" were frequently added to the dogs original performance. They even enlarged the size of the dogs' eyes so that pupil motion would be more noticeable. The artists kept tweaking the footage until they created a scene that portrayed exactly what they wanted.
Despite this, the production crew did run into a few difficulties working with these unpredictable animals. Being dogs, they would occasionally bark, which makes their entire body spam. In order to cut down on the total amount of filming time, film from two different shots of the dogs would be carefully spliced together creating a seamless scene in which no dogs were barking. Also, the bulldog would occasionally wipe his tongue over his entire face. Although it lasted only a short time, the crew had to go in and remove those scenes by pasting good shots of the canine's face over the tongue. In several scenes, both the fake paws and the dog's real paws were visible at the same time. Since it is unlikely that a pooch would stick all four of his legs above the table, at once, the real set had to be removed in post production.
From all that I have read, creating these short commercials took a lot of time and effort. Even after Animal Makers coerced the dogs into sitting around the poker table long enough to get footage, a ton of post production work was required to tweak the film to get the desired effect. I am sure glad though that ESPN decided to create these awesome commercials, and other put the time in (even if they were paid for it) to create them. I sure hope ESPN decides to do more of these commercials sometime.
