February 12th, 2009
The guys at TBWA\PHS were creating a set of banners for Veikkaus' online lottery tickets and wanted to show some traditional high-quality 2D-animation instead of the now-so-usual cut out stuff. Mikko Vormala was more than happy to go back to his roots with a pen and a piece of paper - well, maybe a pen and screen - and get things moving. "We quickly found our mutual style for the characters and animation.", says Mikko. "The only main change Art Director Vesa Kuula made to my initial designs was to make the characters' heads a bit bigger. I totally agreed with him and thought it made the characters even more appealing."
The janitor and the dog were made in traditional hand-drawn 2D animation all the way but the parachute and the music box were first animated in 3D. "With certain objects 3D animation is a quicker and easier way for keeping things in shape and proportion.", says Mikko. "Jani Karvonen first modeled and animated the objects in 3D and I then rotoscoped the rendered frames by hand to keep the same style throughout all the animations. While rotoscoping I also added some cartoon tricks to the movement." The lottery tickets for these two clips were also animated in 3D and the rest of them added in post production by Henri Tani.
The finished animations were seen as floating online advertisements on a number of web sites in December 2008. Henri shipped the footage to online agency !noob who took care of the techical stuff turning them into working online ads.
Credits
Client: VeikkausAgency: TBWA\PHS
Creatives: Vesa Kuula, Axa Fahler
Account Director: Sami Alppiranta
Online Agency: !noob