ASIA-PACIFIC BROADCASTING

It was not the usual order for Australia’s The lab Sydney when tasked by ad agency Euro RSCG to produce the TV commercial (TVC), and print ad, for a new campaign the agency created for Reckitt Benckiser’s Air Wick Scented Oil Plug-ins.

The TVC revolving around a family of ostriches needed to be in full 3D animation. This presented the Lab’s Creative Studio with a number of challenges — not least of which was the human characterisation of the birds.

At pitching stage, “the team at Euro RSCG sent two commercials [featuring] the ostriches to show us the look and feel it wanted us to develop”, says Clinton Downs, The Lab’s head of 3D. “The brief called for a human personification of the birds.”

The Lab’s creative director, Garry Jacques, who worked on the director’s treatment of the characters and their environment, decided to approach this “with a live-action style”.

Downs and Jacques also worked alongside character designer Daniel Bavell, who produced illustrations, pose studies, interior evaluations of space and quirky movements for the pitch.

“[After our presentation], we were told that we had won the job based on our creative strengths and the team executing the ideas. Euro RSCG was convinced that we would truly be able to produce what we had [proposed] and to the level it expected. This is what we call a successful creative pitch combined with a foundation pitch,” Downs asserts.

But the high profile of the Air Wick brand had meant that the character development must fit in with its global branding guidelines. “We met with the teams from Euro RSCG and Reckitt Benckiser who told us they wanted to push the development of the ostriches much farther than they ever had before,” Jacques adds.

In the TVC, the son comes home with a basket of laundry for his mother to wash, but it transpires that the washing is already clean and the real reason for the visit is that he wants to enjoy his mother’s home because it smells nice and inviting.

Jacques and Bavell developed many character sheets detailing the illustrative and design processes, along with storyboard development and animatics to give the client and ad agency as many choices as possible.
“We laid out a whole plethora of creative styles and permutations,” says Jacques. “In essence, we were creating an entirely new world, so every detail had to be looked at. Part of this process involved the characters’ clothing. This was unusual, but obviously a part of the story, so we set about creating their personalities [reflected by the apparel].”

Jacques says Josh, the son character, became a ‘dude’ while his sister, after experimenting with five different hairstyles, became a ‘newtown chick’, complete with blue nail polish and edgy attitude. Their clothes were also designed to suit their personalities.

The 3D challenges were further heightened by the human personification of the characters, Downs maintains.

“We had to build a family of unique characters ... within their environment,” he explains. “This included sets for the laundry, hall way and garden — a complete mix of interiors and exteriors.

“We started with the son. Working on the basis that he was the second most important character, we figured we’d get him right and deal with any potential issues before working on the others. It was a tough job modelling him from the illustrations into 3D but, after a rigorous review process, we got him just right.”

Meanwhile, Jacques was pushing the creative boundaries within the branding guidelines — “the first time we’ve worked with such clear ... guidelines”. “In order to take leaps forward we had to design the characters to a highly-formed state, get the buy-in from both client and agency, and ensure there were no surprises,” he says.

“We really emphasised the characters' human aspects and, working within the global brand guidelines, made this an interesting process with good reference points. It was great to be able to interpret and develop ideas.”

To tackle the challenges, The Lab’s 3D team used the following animation tools: Maya for 3D; Nuke for compositing; Adobe After-Effects for emanation; and two different renderers — Mental Ray and RenderMan.

Maya was an obvious choice as the team was well versed with the software, which has been around a long time, making it almost the defacto industry standard. Maya “is flexible, versatile, powerful and you can find a great talent pool knowing how to use it to its full potential”, says the team who also hails the combination of 3D tools for enabling “the most efficient workflow for this kind of full 3D animation TVC”, yielding excellent results.

Just as the characters and their human personification neared completion, the team encountered some fresh challenges. “If anything, we had made the ostriches too human and moved too far away from [the reality of] the original bird,” Downs lets on. “We again reviewed real ostrich for reference. So, I suggested we just panel-beat it up, and — metaphorically speaking — basically punching the model into shape. After about 20 minutes and some repair work, the re-conditioned ostrich was approved by the client and the ad agency.”

The creative team then built all the blending shapes and character moves. In what was described as a unique process, and with careful modelling, all of the ostrich son’s facial expressions and poses were then morphed into those for the mother, daughter and father models.

The team painstakingly re-used all the facial shapes and hand modelling, gradually putting the hair and fur in place, with the characters’ fine hair procedurally generated.

The environments for the TVC were lit in two ways, using Mental Ray and physical base lighting for interior scenes, and relying on the Renderman and handcrafted lighting for exterior illumination.

Says Downs: “The whole process was approached much like theatrical live action and our reference was a Pixar-ish look of subtle room lighting and sub-surface illumination.”

Jacques credits much of the TVC’s success to the intensely collaborative process between The Lab, Euro RSCG and Reckitt Benckiser. “It was great that the agency, via its art director, Catherine Hope, had a clear idea of what it wanted to achieve,” he says. “We had a solid foundation and well-defined parameters working towards making the commercial spot as beautiful as possible. The team at Reckitt Benckiser loved things happening in the background, so we really had some fun with that concept.”   

 

 

 

 

 

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