ASIFA India

In its continued effort of sharing knowledge by bringing forth some of the most interesting topics for the benefit of the animation and vfx community, ASIFA India’s latest Cg MeetUp saw a packed house at the Whistling Woods auditorium.

With behind the scenes action being presented by the speakers on some of the most recent and popular television commercials, the meet up proved to be a lot of fun and gave a never seen before insight into the making of these commercials. The session was kick started by Prakash Verma from Nirvana Films, who has directed the immensely popular Vodafone Zoo Zoo commercials. His presentation included the whole pre-production process of designing the look of the characters to planning the shoot and then getting all elements together including sound to produce a completely new world which was all built as a set. Prakash Verma further spoke about how he got inspiration from certain old animation films and how they came up with a unique style which so closely resembled animation but in fact was all live action. A round of questions and answers followed and Prakash Verma’s presentation ended after he shared some funny videos and photographs from the set which had the audience in splits.

 The next to follow was the Visual Computing Labs team consisting of Mandar Pingulkar , Deepak Ganguly and Sanoj Menon. They presented the making of the Spice Mobile commercial which required them to create a photo real brooder fish, its babies and an eel. They explained the audience the thought behind achieving a documentary type look for the commercial. The team went through the kind of references that they looked at from the animation point of view and also shared the lighting and compositing process to achieve a realistic underwater look. After the Spice Mobile commercial, they showcased their work on the Kellogs Honeyloops commercial which had a cartoony honey bee in a live action environment interacting with live actors. They shared some of the character designs for the honey bee, the rigging and animation tests and explained in detail a shot where the bee went from a live action environment to a full cg one. 

  Vaibhav, Hitesh & Prabhav from the Rhythm & Hues team were the next to present the Alpenliebe Creamfills commercial. Their presentation started with explaining the audience the challenge that the team faced in getting the Cg lions to look completely real in the first part of the commercial and then make them stand up on their two legs to dance in the later part without losing the real attributes of the characters. They took the audience through the live action shooting process and the role of a vfx team on the set, they also shared some of the reference videos that were looked at to get the right kind of energy and rhythm for choreographing the lions. Further, they shared a few animation iterations that some of the select shots went through. The lighting and compositing process to seamlessly integrate the cg characters into a live action environment formed the concluding part of the Rhythm & Hues presentation. A question and answer session followed to end the round of presentations.

The event ended with the Nvidia sponsored lucky draw where one member of the audience was the lucky winner of a nvidia graphics card.