With advertisements being bombarded every second at the viewer from various TV channels and media. Creativity and innovation becomes a must in order to break clutter. Moving out of the realm of live action, Bangalore based Thinxworks has used animation to create exciting advertisements.
In its 12 month old existence, the studio has worked on four fully animated commercials including ones for Versata, Siemens, Campus Connect and Oracle. The animation studio is an offshoot of design studio ReZonant Design and has a total of 12 artists.
The TVC for Versata which was worked on for three months is a recruitment film which had to portray the company as young and vibrant and hence was born the idea of â€?The Pre Historic Wheel.â€? As is evident from the name, the story is set in the pre-historic ages and is about a group of people trying to create the wheel, while by then another group had already created the car and advanced in technology. What the ad was required to bring out was “how Versata as a company and brand has evolved today.” What set this ad apart from the other commercials was the use of claymation, giving it a rich look.
Talking about using clay MP Hariharan, CEO, ReZonant Design and Thinxworks shared with Animation Xpress.com, “There are seven key characters in the film and the characters getting the maximum screen footage were created first and also had to go through re-makes. The animation sequence took over three days to master and even then there were a few areas that we felt right away needed touch ups in post production.”
Wanting to find a theme which would connect with students to enroll themselves for preliminary examination preparation, the team at Thinxworks came up with the idea of exams. One would wonder here how this would entice the students to enroll! Considering that this was for Campus Connect, at the end I guess it did make sense.
This is what the team had to say about the ad, “What we did for the ad in 3D was to create a golf course to drive home a few points! (pun intended). We narrated the story of a few pencils as central characters. The turning point in the narrative comes when the protagonist (here itâ€?s the pencil) picks up the right club to clobber home the ball in the right place.”
Sharing with our publication about the philosophy of the company, Thinxworksâ€? Creative Head Bolin said, “We develop creatives to suit the needs of our clients. Our philosophy is to do a thorough study of the USPs and the market expectation to bring out result-oriented and effective Advertisements.”
The latest laser technology is what had to be showcased in the Siemen�s commercial. Created in 3D, the film has a humorous side to it with a soccer match being played with players resembling actual cigarettes.
Speaking about the creative challenges faced during the making of the Siemenâ€?s ad, MP Hariharan said, “Once the technical process was created in 3D, it was found to be highly detailed and informative but the drawback was that it was uninteresting. Thus, to hold the audienceâ€?s interest humour had to be added to it.”
The recruitment film for Oracle was termed as �a battle of creativity� by the artists at the studio. The TVC showed the blissful college life and the life beyond the workplace through a stick like skinny character in 2D animation who in the film explored the real world.
Commenting on the experience on working on advertisements at Thinxworks, Pritpal Singh, Conceptualizer elaborated, “Working at Thinxworks is like working on a platform where we put forth our ideas in a different way. We just show simple things in our films in a surprising manner, packaged with humor and a twist in the tale.”
With studios such as Thinxworks using animation to reach out to the masses, here�s a thumbs up to them and all others who are taking animation to the next level.