It took us forever to come up with an illustration for the main page. A few weeks ago I sat down with Liz and her sketchbook and we tossed some brilliant ideas back and forth:

(These and all the other drawings on this page are by Liz Syrnick, by the way.) After some discussion, this is what we settled on:

Everyone claimed to like the drawing, but they were confused. “Why bunnies?” they asked.

“Well, it’s a group buying site, so, you know…bunnies in a shopping cart.”

Tavis and Jeff tried to be tactful. “We really like the bunnies,” Tavis explained, “but we’re worried that people won’t take us seriously if the main image is so…”

“Cute,” said Jeff.

“Yeah. We need people to understand that we’re serious players in this field.”

“But that we’re still fun to hang around with,” Jeff added.

So the shopping cart bunnies, and all the additional bunnies that Liz had drawn for the interior pages of the site, had to be thrown out. I hate to see them left homeless, so I’m putting them up here.

Undaunted, Liz retired to her sketchbook, and a few days later she and Marie-Louise emerged with some tiny construction workers assembling a website. Behold, the new home of VendAsta’s group buying platform!

Last week I got the opportunity to learn a little more. We have a new partner for our group buying platform:

Cartoon seem familiar? One of the perks partners receive when they sign up with VendAsta’s Daily Deal Platform 3S is their very own branded, customized, and colour-coordinated video. We’re such sticklers for detail that we even determined to give the voiceover an authentic New Zealand accent.

At first we thought we could get Scott, our Australian-in-residence, to supply the voice. But it turns out there’s a difference between the Aussie drawl and the Kiwi twang, which Scott illustrated by playing us this video:

…Of which we understood not a word.

So we had to find a real New Zealander. But as you might expect, the supply of Kiwi voice actors in Saskatoon is pretty limited. After soliciting help on Twitter we got word of a recent immigrant named Chris who, it was rumoured, had done a little acting back in his high school days in Whakatane.

(Incidentally, in words derived from the Maori language the “wh” is pronounced as “f”. That was an interesting conversation:

ME: So, whereabouts in New Zealand did you grow up?

CHRIS: Fock-a-tawny.

ME: Fock-a-what? How do you spell that?

CHRIS: W…H…

ME: Whaaa…?)

Everyone’s pretty pleased with how the voiceover turned out. We got word from our partner that Chris has “a great Kiwi accent…not too rural, but not too soft either.”

But he’s not just a pretty voice. Chris also helped us revise our script. In the North American version we say:

If the target isn’t reached by the end of the day, the deal is cancelled, and no-one pays a dime.

It seems that in New Zealand they don’t call them “dimes” – they’re just called “ten cent pieces”. So Chris changed the line to “no-one pays a cent”. We paid for an actor and got a copy editor for free!

Anyway, if you’re looking for great bargains in New Zealand, check out Whlocking…sorry, Flocking Good Deals, coming soon to Auckland and other towns.

Here’s a cartoon we made for our first partner, DirectWest, to explain how it works.

Having watched the video, I’m sure you’re wondering two things:

Where do I sign up? and,

Why are the people in the cartoon so squiggly?

Let me address the latter question. This video is the product of a collaborative effort which we’ll call “group rotoscoping”. (I considered “grotoscoping”, but it sounds too much like an invasive medical procedure.)

To make your own group rotoscoping video, just follow these easy steps:

1. Round up your co-workers and film them carrying ceiling tiles around the abandoned offices on the second floor.

2. Convert this video to a frame rate of 12 frames per second, number the frames, and get all 990 of them printed off at your local copy centre.

3. Scramble the order of the frames and, on a Friday afternoon, distribute them to your team of highly-paid software developers. (If software developers are unavailable, any large group of nimble-fingered geniuses will suffice.)

4. Instruct your galley slaves to trace the frames with black Sharpies onto transparency film. This will require some careful definition of exactly which details need to be traced and which need to be left out.

5. Assuming you’ve got 15 people tracing at an average rate of 3 minutes per frame, you should get done in about three and a half hours. (It took us longer because some of my galley slaves jumped ship while I wasn’t looking.)

6. Gather up the transparencies and shuffle them back into the correct order. Scan them and import them into your animation program of choice.

7. Assign an eager young person to go through each of the frames, correcting the more egregious deformities, like three-eyed Blair.

8. Press play and watch your cartoon creations squiggle to life.

Apart from being an interesting experiment in its own right – just to see how a roomful of distinct tracing styles would average out into a coherent moving image – this cartoon actually has some thematic relevance, which is more than I can say for any other video I’ve made in my advertising career. It illustrates how you can save – money or time – by getting a crowd of people working together.

If I’d traced those frames on my own it might’ve taken me weeks, if I didn’t saw off my tracing hand first. With the help of the team, the tracing got done in about a day, and the whole video was completed in under two weeks.