Carbon - “We were over the moon when we received the creative brief from First Person,” says Chapple. “They charged us with interpreting and expanding upon the concepts and characters they developed. Each vignette tackled different issues men face with enlarged prostates. Combining important men’s health messages with a comedy performance, and a full CG pink Monster? Yes please.”

First Person’s Stefan Mumaw and Eric Melin led the scripting and narrative development, bringing a clear creative vision and deep understanding of how the Monster needed to behave across the broader campaign.

Featuring the unforgettable Prostate Monster, this was a full script-to-ship project for the Carbon team. “I got to know this monster and his personality very well!” continues Chapple. “We worked closely with First Person throughout the concepting, script writing, storyboarding, and pre-production stages. They were amazing collaborators and gave us as much creative freedom as we could have asked for. They were always there for the details of the client and product, which of course they knew in depth after so many months of upstream development. We had great Zoom calls where a question would arise, be diplomatically and openly discussed, and a decision could be made, right away. The dream!”

Liam and the Carbon team then moved on to planning all aspects of the shoot, deciding to use a stand in actor, but not just any stand in actor…. “Our 6’4” actor was dressed in a green morph suit, a bright pink furry coat and had a huge custom-made monster head! Created by Carbon’s Head of CG Frank Grecco, he printed and mounted our monster’s hefty head onto a rig with a backpack set up. This gave our actors an eye-line to look at, as well as someone to bounce off and create reactions. The other, more practical outcome was he created shadows on his scene partners, and even lifted the bedding into place in our bedroom scene. We didn’t use any performance from him, instead the animators were free to bring the character to life as they saw fit. This allowed us to go through several iterations before we settled on the final, monstrous performance.”

With the shoot wrapped, our VFX and color team set about bringing Urolift’s Prostate Monster to life. “We spent a lot of time finding his character, what his motives are and how he feels. He’s big and lumbering, so he doesn’t turn his head when he looks, instead he turns his whole upper body from the hips! He’s not malicious, and he feels kind of guilty when he disturbs his host, so we leaned into grimacing to portray this sort of emotion.” 

“To make him feel big and heavy, we really leaned into reducing his movements to a bare minimum. This was an interesting change in how we’d typically bring this sort of character to life. Usually it’s lots of motion and big jumps. For our enlarged Prostate Monster, we decided to make him as human as possible, and layered lots of micro movements into his performance. One of my favourite moments is the little knee squeeze in the storytime shot. We meticulously discussed how many blinks there should be and when they should happen. “I loved diving into those sorts of details with Stefan Mumaw, Director of Narrative Strategy, and Eric Melin, Creative Director, at First Person,” Ends Chapple.

Final Monster

Designed to spark conversations and connect patients, huge shout out to First Person for bringing us on as partners for this monstrous (in all the right ways) campaign!