Bringing together two massive IP’s into one trailer

An absolute pleasure and honour to direct this trailer for Magic The Gathering to announce the long-awaited collaboration between these two massive brands. The trailer features the iconic Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles as 2D cell/hand drawn animation in a live action setting. As a huge fan of WHO FRAMED ROGER RABBIT, it was a brilliant challenge to keep the classic 2D cartoon nature of the characters but ensure they felt fully immersed and integrated into the live action environments.

Produced by the wonderful team at Eyebolls, I also had legendary animation director Tony Cervone (who worked on the original SPACE JAM) supervising the animation team who worked tirelessly for months. No 3D, key framing or AI shortcuts here. They were absolutely hand-drawn characters integrated into a live-action world. Making it believable meant focusing completely on that integration. Every choice was designed to support it. When an animated character truly interacts with live action, you start believing it immediately. The goal wasn’t just for the animation to fit in, but to elevate everything around it.

The VFX and Comp team, lead by Dan Bull, were brought in early to give them time to test different approaches and figure out how to make the 2D animation sit naturally inside live action. Their brief was clear – to keep the integrity and charm of the 2D style, but integrate it convincingly into the filmed environment. And they did an excellent job!

A big part of the treatment was setting a look and feel that would ensure that they felt like a part of the environment whilst retaining their 2D style. This is where the strong, warm, sunset backlit feel came from. It was a bold decision to light everything this way with no turning back to soften the look or amount of anamorphic lens flares later! Thankfully the clients loved the approach and could see how giving the film a strong visual style gave us the tools to bring the Turtles into our world in a more natural, integrated way rather than then feeling flat and slapped on top of the image.

From a performance perspective, I really did just treat the Turtles like living and breathing actors throughout this whole process. I just imagined how I’d like the characters to move, exist or be framed in the space like any other performer. I did want to ensure we had some fun moments of interaction between the Wizards and Turtles, especially in the first scene they’re all together so, when casting, I made sure I found actors who were skilled physically to enable as much interaction as possible.

Big shout out to our art team and production designer Jamie Lapsey who built the apartment set and created the office, boardroom, art room and tech lab sets in the shell of an empty office building with such lovely texture and detail throughout.

And hats off to the unseen hero of the piece, actor Ryan Kane, who donned the huge green Turtle suit throughout the entire shoot to stand in for our animators and fellow actors with 100% dedication to all of the roles.

Exec Producer: Rhona Drummond
Creative Producer: Victoria Watson
Creative Director: Garry Marshall
Director of Photography: David Meadows
Production Designer: Jamie Lapsley
Colourist: Dan Moran @ Company3
VFX Supervisor / Lead Comp Artist: Dan Bull
Casting Director: Martin Gibbons
Senior Animator: Pablo Navarro
Ink & Paint Supervisor: Margarite Rojas
Sound Post: Savalas Post