Client: IGA
Agency: Sid Lee
Production: Tonic DNA
Director: Kun Chang
Co-Director / CGSup: Fabien Fulchiron
Animation: Nebula
Client: IGA
Agency: Sid Lee
Production Studio: Tonic DNA
Director: Kun Chang
Co-Director / CG Supervisor: Fabien Fulchiron
Animation Studio: Nebula
Animation Production Manager: Ana Fino
Animation Supervisors: Ana Fino, Guilherme Afonso, Miguel Madaíl de Freitas
3D Animators: Ahmed Adel, David Omair, Gabriel Garcia Poignet, Miguel Madaíl de Freitas
For the second year in a row, Canadian grocery retailer IGA, agency Sid Lee and Tonic DNA entrusted us with yet another heartfelt holidays film, where we had the pleasure of being responsible of supervising and animating all the fable section. This meant coming up with creative and emotional acting that goes along with the characters personalities and client/director vision through.
Family meals are a universal tradition for Christmas. Preparations are a big part and making desserts is a very special moment. This year’s IGA Christmas ad takes place in the kitchen, where Grandpa teaches his granddaughters how to make Yule Log, while telling the tale of a selfish Mr Beaver who wouldn’t share. The final result? A great ad and a beautiful story showing that, as always, sharing is caring.
The fable portion of the ad is arguably the most important, having a stop-motion quality by being animated at 12fps. Our experience in directing was key for supervising all shots, and we made sure all the cute characters were animated to their personality and really added to the story being told – an ever bigger challenge given there is no dialogue. Little gags and details were added throughout – be sure to check them all!
Establishing a robust and efficient pipeline throughout the whole production is of the utmost importance when dealing with an international, remote and multi studio project.
That means setting up/managing our internal team and tools and making sure the rest of the production with other teams involved was smooth. An alembic based pipeline was implemented so a wider array of softwares could be used: rigging, animation and hair in Maya, modelling, shading and lighting in Cinema4D.
This allowed for easy transfer of assets. In order to spend most of our time doing creative work instead of managing work we implemented a cloud based solution mixed with carefully filtered automatic file syncing that would make sure every artist/team had only the needed assets for the task at hand as well as duplicate assets detection.
