All Stars

The Job

An end of the year TV and online campaign with all the Migros characters together at last. Migros was planning to give away special marbles as a premium, and have wooden marble sets from Quadrilla in the sale, and for this an action packed animation was needed, with the four characters coming to life and racing inside marbles over the marble track.

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My Role

— Managing ballpark, treatment and the winning pitch

— Client point of contact for all production and financial needs

— Scoping, budgeting, and planning

— Finding and booking freelancers / planning resources

— Clear communication between all stakeholders and personnel

— Invoicing, collecting final assets, approved credit lists and portfolio live dates

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The Process

Before we took on the job we had to assess the state of the existing character models. Could we use them or not. Find the Quadrilla toys to reference.

We reserved some time for style development for the world with the marble track, and find and achieve the paintery style in the texture-maps of the characters.

Then a (re)design and (re)build for each of the 4 characters, making them all fit together in this world (some of the characters we already had in our library, some needed to be made from scratch)

The campaign key-visual for print was needed long before the CG marble track was finished, so we chose to have it hand painted by an illustrator. Luckily due to the paintery style of the tv-spot the styles didn't clash.

We had to build a massive marble track "castle", based on the actual toy tracks, containing each element of the animatic in a logical set-up, then adding more layers in the distance to make it seem more epic, more "castlely"..

A well-paced animatic was made in close collaboration with the director. This one went though many iterations as the interaction between the characters on the track was complicated and we were looking for fun/funny situations.

Once the animatic was perfect and approved, a team of animators took care of the many different animations, including complex camera moves and characteristic expressions of the characters.

Lighting, rendering and compositing with color effects, and 2D cartoon FX for the actions.

We delivered the shots to the client as sequences with mattes, who took care of sound-design, grading, localizing.