It's barely two months since the Rugby World Cup and here we are again, watching overgrown monsters engaging in a violent contact sport, but this time it's all down to CGI as directing duo Alex & Steffen turn out a cracker for Snickers via Toronto's Spy Films and BBDO. shots.net caught up with Alex for a quick chat

Since meeting at the Filmakademie Baden-Württemberg in 2000, Alexander Kiesl and Steffen Hacker have worked together consistently with career highlights including the CFP-e 2005 award-winning Xbox Racing Beats spot. With Hacker well versed in the fine art of compositing, Kiesl honed his skills in 3D animation, the end result being a dynamic directing duo who have, between shoots, started their own Stuttgart post house Unexpected, which now boasts a staff of 40.

Their latest spot, and this week's Hotshot, is a carefully crafted Snickers commercial for the Russian market. Monsters take on monsters in an epic game of rugby played amongst a cemetery of scrapped airplanes. Each monster, we learn, is in fact a human sporting monster appearance thanks to Snickers.

"The agency gave us a brief where they wanted to use some bio-mechanical, robot-like creatures for the whole campaign," explains Kiesl. "We suggested they have more bio-influenced creatures for the Rugby spot and more mechanical-influenced creatures for the following spot. They gave us the idea about having maybe some boars, or rhinos for the first one. We already had an in-house designer and so we hired another one and made a couple of designs just to get the right direction."

Given a simple brief and plenty of freedom, the pair found a unique location in the Tucson desert, Arizona. There amongst the rattlesnakes and scorpions and under the blistering sun, the spot's foundations were painstakingly laid.

"We shot the empty planes first," Kiesl says. "Before we started shooting we already had an edit so we knew how long we had to track from this point to that point. So we knew the length of the sequences. Most of the time we had a stand-in so we could judge the height of the creatures because they're almost five metres high."

Shooting sequences in HDRI to capture the stunning surroundings, Kiesl admits that the desert light wasn't always a positive for the crew.

"Although we shot in the desert, there were no huge hills around us to cover the sun. It always moved so we had to rotate the set a little bit every time. It wasn't a massive issue, but it made it pretty difficult to keep the continuity. The heat was between 42-45ºC and there are rattlesnakes and scorpions. It was like a small adventure. When do you ever get the chance to go to a location like this?"

Kiesl insists the wrecked planes are the real deal and mostly untouched. Having scouted the bizarre location a month beforehand, the pair and their team took two days to shoot, with only the monsters added in at post-production.

"The whole post-production was fun. Animating those guys all in all took six weeks with all the 3D tracking of the cam. We had to 3D track all the cameras. Sometimes the moves were very fast and we had to do lots of stuff manually, but we're very happy with it and so is the client and now we're currently working on the second one which is completely different."

The second spot in the series will air in Russia in February, so for now you'll just have to make do with Rugby, which is viewable by clicking here.