As a brand Dunzo has always strived to foster diversity and inclusion as a part of our ethos, and has understood the importance of using its platform to drive positive conversations around these subjects that really matter. Over the past few years, we have tried to create awareness and educational content on Pride across the different brand channels such as our social media, in-app communication, and offline activities. The challenge of integrating 3D and 2D animation styles in to a single video made this piece a unique experience for us.
Pre-Production
Concept
This year, we wanted to dive in to the aspect of how Pride isn’t just a color of a month on the calendar. It’s about representation and how it should be imbibed in to our value system. So the video that we have created is an ode to that theme, and of course, when you have a diverse set of characters from our Duniverse, it provides a beautiful palette to tell meaningful stories.
Storyboard
After the concept was finalized we moved on to storyboarding. To create the storyboard we opted for a traditional hand-drawn method, and was made up of a number of sequences of illustrations representing each shot, with notes about what's going on in the scene and the camera placement for each shot.
A few of the storyboard illustrations are shown here:
Art Design
Once the storyboard was over, it was time to select the color palette. According to the concept of the film i.e. “Pride”, we wanted to use a lot of colors to accentuate the June room whereas the July room needed to have a monochromatic color palette. Hence we decided to pick vibrant colors such as pink, violet, orange, green, white, and more, for the June room and black, white, and shades of grey for the July room. Choosing specific color palettes for each month really helped in the process of storytelling, as it gave a subtext to our visuals. The sudden switch between the vibrant color to black and white grasps the viewer's attention and foreshadows our plot.
Production
2D Production
Illustration
At the start of the 2D animation process, the base illustration needed to be done. Overall there were ten 2D shots, of which 3 were complete 2D and 7 were 2D-3D combination shots. So for all the 10 shots, there were illustrations made for 2D animation following the monochromatic color palette.
2D Animation
There were a total of 11 shots of 2D of which 7 shots were a combination of 2D-3D, which were extremely hard to do as we have to make sure that 2D animation matches its proportion, flow, and style as it is for the 3D animation. For this reason, we had to take the brute force way of animation- the frame-by-frame method. But we couldn’t use frame-by-frame animation everywhere as it would require a lot of effort and we had strict timelines to adhere to. The other option we were left with is to create everything in Illustrator, keeping the 3D video perspective in mind and importing it to After Effects to animate the basic position, scaling, and rotation (for expressions and all the 2D shots). So we planned the 2D section using these two methods.
3D Production
Rigging
Rigging is the process of adding a skeleton to a 3D model. These controls help the animator to bring the character to life. For this project, we wanted to bring into focus our existing pride characters Jusmeet and Caraline Ringraj as the protagonists of the story. All the characters used in the animation were mascots of Dunzo & members of the Duniverse.
Set Modelling
Layouting
The layouting process can be described as creating the stage on which the animation of the characters takes place. During the process of layouting, the characters and objects are placed according to the storyboard illustrations. This process is extremely crucial to refine what was planned in the storyboard and to get an idea of the look and feel of the film.
3D Animation
After the placement of characters and the set in the layout process, we need to make them perform on the stage. True to our animation style, we took a semi-realistic approach to the movement of the characters. There were 11 shots of 3D animation of which 6 were 2D-3D combination shots. The main challenge we faced during the making of the film was breaking the wall, so the solution we came up with was to create separate pieces of the wall and animate them individually.
Lighting
Lighting is the technique that is used to light up a 3D environment. We used various vibrant colored lights for the June room to create a more loud and jovial vibe. We have used environmental fog to give a smoke machine-like effect with the strobe lights. We added a few light sources in the scene to highlight key areas and add character to the set. The end slide where all the other rooms are revealed brings out the bright spectrum of the pride rainbow.
Post Production
VFX & Music
After the rendering process was completed it was time to decide the vfx elements for the big reveal for the end slide. We created some visuals in after effects with the particle simulator to reveal the entire calendar with an explosion of color and glitter. The music for the film took inspiration from our sonic branding, and was composed with the ebb and flow of the narrative in the film. The track was put together once a render was out, keeping in mind the duration of the film and the emotion it conveyed.
Compositing
After we received all the rendered exr files, the next step was to denoise them in Maya to get a clearer image for the film. After denoising the exr files, we moved on to After Effects to composite the film. It was made in 24 fps and all the exr files were combined into clips. It is in this stage that we worked on the transitions between the 2D and 3D worlds, color correction, sound, and other effects that make the film complete.
STILL FRAMES
Thank you for your time
