Thank you for calling zappos.com (Spanish)
We're having a great day here at Zappos, this is Manon, how can I help you?
Hi, I have a little problem
Zappos wanted a campaign that reflected their culture
The major drive of it is to talk a lot about the customer service of Zappos
So we came up with this idea to kind of put them to the tests
They called in to the customer care lines, unbeknownst to the customer care people at Zappos
And they came up with all these ridiculous scenarios
that the Zappos customer care people had to then problem solve
For example a woman wants to exchange some work out clothes for a deep fryer
Oh that’s amazing a deep fryer, wow, De'Longhi
Yeah, I'm kinda going in a different direction
Yeah well we definitely have that in stock, its $95.95
I mean why work out when you can deep fry right? Yeah, exactly
They were as helpful as they would be with the regular customer
because to them we were just regular customers, so they had no idea
So they got a lot of really great audio, they wanted to sort of recreate it with puppets
But Arron thought it was very great opportunity to try to do something really different
Then we had this enormous exploration of what is the best way to represent these characters
We definitely understood that there were real people on the other ends of those lines
We wanted to really celebrate the Zappos employees
What we wanted was these things to have a humanity to them
We knew that using monster type characters like you might find in muppets didn't make as much sense
cause we wanted to have a likeness to some people in the customer service of ours
We would have photos of actual Zappos employees and that was about it
But based on those photos would be like okay create a character based off of this
In order to base our designs on these actual customer service people we also wanted to make sure
there was a certain level of stylization
We had designed what that stylization was so we started to choose different visual motifs
that ran nicely through the entire family of characters that we were working on
They have slightly elongated heads, these longish arms, very thin bodies
And doing the research of all this sort of stuff
we learned an interesting term “flocking” well a lot of that furry kinda fuzzines
Most the puppets we've been asked to do are fuzzy, these were not wanted to be fuzzy
So we had to find out the proper fabric to cover them with
What we had to do was take one piece of fabric and stretch it seamlessly over the entire face
without any seams, darts, or marks which is really challenging
The first we test we did on Giovanna, her beautifully sculpted nose flattened out
So then we had to go in and rethink
and put different gel mediums, different glues into the nose, ears, and lips
Basically to thicken them to make them hard so when we stretch them they didn’t collapse
We wanted to create this world where when you look at it you say that’s a Zappos puppet
There is an emotionally not ready character her name is Irene
There's Michael, he's a big sort of buff guy with a green shirt, but he's really a sensitive guy at heart
There's the one who wants a deep fryer, Elfica
Giovanna that was the one based off of the actual customer service person
There's Jamie that was based off of Jamie
Jamie, he’s one of our creative directors, you know we were all sitting at dinner
And I think it was our ACD that looked at Jamie and he was like, you, we are gonna make a puppet out of you
And he became a puppet
In addition to all of the hand puppeting that's going on is we're actually animating the eyes
We decided to shoot all the puppets with tracking marks on their faces and where their eyes were
And not shoot actual eyes so that we could track in CGI's that mimic the materials of the puppets
The design is an important part of each character
but the life that's breathed into it is being done by our puppet maker, Randy
The puppets need him to sort of be who they are
I mean we have the audio already but most of the time we’re on set it's rehearsing
just trying to find those moments that really bring our story to life
If you call customer service at Zappos, you might talk to one of these real people
And there's more of a connection to the fact
that there are people that they have specific personalities and they are individuals
And the contrast of that is really nice that we have something real happening
and we are using puppets to recreate that
When the hand comes out you kind of forget it's not real
But as you’re watching, you are like, wow that puppet is a good actor