It’s raining awards for Vaibhav More Films! After clinching this year’s P
romaxBDA India Gold Award- Best Programme Title Sequence for Terror of Horror Promo, it’s time to rejoice again for the studio as its animated tvc Tom and Jerry Hands- Dr Lifebuoy Commercial has grabbed Promax BDA Asia Gold Award for Best Brand- Integration Promo.
AnimationXpress.com caught up with Vaibhav More, Founder of the studio to know about the making of this animated commercial and he starts the conversation with us by saying, “We had to simplify our visuals and maintain a clean look throughout the tvc as it was targeted to kid audience.”
How did this project happen?
Senior Promo Producer of CN Hong Kong Sanil Menda gave me a call sharing the idea of creating a series of 5 animated commercials for UNILEVER’s Product Lifebuoy. I was told about the concept of animating human hands and adding characters to them, which I found extremely challenging and exciting to work on. I had no idea how to work out the technique and just went with my instinct and grabbed the opportunity. –Click here to view this award winning TVC
What were the top three quick points that came in your mind after hearing the brief?
The brief given to me was that we needed to show how to clean your hands with Lifebuoy hand wash. And, now we only wanted interesting stories to present this idea in a creative manner. I first visualized realistic hand movements and rendering style. But then soon realized its animation and I need to make it larger than life and graphically correct. So these were three things that immediately came to my mind
- How should I link the stories to the product?
- How much time will I need to work out the whole campaign
- What preparation do I need to do before starting the job?
Was selecting Tom and Jerry your sole choice or CN Hong Kong?
It was a mutually decided by me and Sanil. We were just worried if we could get permissions to copy the mannerisms of these famous characters. But luckily we were supported by the TURNER GROUP and after few presentations we were able to get the go ahead from them.
Please share the credit list and is it a series of commercials?
I’ve directed and animated the TVC’s, the role of CG Generalist has been successfully played by Prashant Shahane, Compositing and Rendering has been executed by Nitin Patil and Sound Design done by Roto Shah.Yes, it is a series of five animated commercials, each of 60 seconds, and the first two tvc’s are based on Tom and Jerry. The ads are aired at CN India, Pakistan, Singapore and few other countries
How was the pre-production like?
I received a rough script and few scribble boards from Sanil. This campaign was all improvisation of style, design, story and editing. I was lucky to get so much of freedom from Sanil to play around with the storyline and animation. Once we designed the characters and got them approved, it was very important to make first film as good as possible. This helped me build trust for my clients and producer. We followed the traditional way of storyboarding, lay outing and animating.
Can you share about the look and feel?
We decide to keep the backgrounds simple and clean as we see in the traditional Tom and Jerry films. Also we made sure to give maximum animated moves to the hands. Look and feel evolved in the entire process of creating the tvc. And I really love to surprise myself with the outputs… 🙂
Is there a specific reason for choosing 3D for animating the tvc?
Well, 3D was always the most highlighted medium that we spoke about when brainstorming. We had never worked on a series of films before in 3D and this being the reason we decided to go ahead with this medium. Also the client was convinced about using 3D. It was pretty challenging for a team of three to work on 5 commercials, we faced technical issues too, but with proper planning we managed to complete it in three months time.
We would like to conclude this conversation by asking you about the challenges faced?
The difficult part was that we were only three people my team. I had to all by myself design the story boards, Animatics, rough staging and final animation. Prashant had to take care of Modeling, Rigging, Lighting and Renders. Nitin stepped in after first film for helping us with renders and lineups. Also we made it a point to take on the challenge to not miss our deadline. We first set our deadlines and then worked out our plan accordingly. After all if you can’t deliver on time then there’s no point putting so much of efforts. I am very thankful to Cartoon Network for have shown confidence in me.