SECI’s 2021 campaign against domestic violence towards women is something we couldn’t be more humbled and proud to be a part of – “Not everything will be alright if there’s victims of domestic violence still”.

Miguel Madaíl de Freitas and all the team really went out of their comfort zone for this dual-technique approach, conveying all the emotion and seriousness of the topic in a more palatable yet beautiful craft.

Tone and Style

Creating an animation involving domestic violence requires a delicate balance between a strong visual impression and visual elegance for good taste. We needed to convey all the emotion and seriousness of the topic in a more palatable yet beautiful craft.

We set out to find this balance based on the artistic style of C’Marie, whose striking visuals were chosen for this campaign. The end result is our contribution to a very noble cause, with a final result we couldn’t be more proud and humbled by.

Technique – when 2D meets 3D

The brief above set the course for a dual-technique approach: full 2D, hand drawn characters faithful to C’Marie’s illustrations were animated and composited on full 3D, nearly photorealistic environments.

This really enabled the characters to pop and have our attention even more focused on them and the story unraveling in front of us. Below you can find some extra visuals on the creation and animation process!

Creative Freedom is Key!

Having a 3D base environment let us explore and iterate creatively on the camera movements and framing so that the 2D animation team quickly had a locked animatic to work on.

Relying on a 3D pipeline allowed us to create lighting and shadow effects in the 3D scene, further alleviating the 2D team from such tasks and having them focused on the character animations.