Nissen Miniatures
May 8th, 2009

In the miniature world stupid glasses end up being destroyed one way or another, but no need to worry - you can always buy new ones from Nissen. The series of print ads created with TBWA\PHS have offered us an opportunity to do all kinds of stuff we have rarely done before. Truly think and act out of the box.

A chair that used to be Turkka's headphones and a corkscrew.

The paper shredder picture was Henri Tani's debut as a retouch artist at Piñata. "I probably spent more time finding and creating the desired materials than actually doing retouch work.", says Henri. "Turkka Kylliäinen created the basic scene and most of the elements in 3D, but we used a lot of real-world stuff we found at the studio on top of it."

Being the first one in the series, creating the miniature world for the mountain picture proved to be a bit of a challenge. "I found myself balancing between creating a realistic world of glasses and a miniature.", says Tuomas Korpi. "The nature subject was quite non-miniaturelike with it's wide and far view."

Tuomas decided to use photographed miniature railway mountain elements on the front with the snow effects done by painting. The snow in the middleground with the glasses and skis were done in 3D by Turkka and Rami Riihijärvi. "We searched for the right feel for the colours from old skiing photographs.", says Tuomas. "With strong shadows and a rough difference between the materials on the front and the painting on the back, I think we captured the non-realistic atmosphere quite well."

The branch picture was another challenging nature subject with some balancing between miniature world and realism. Tuomas approached the image with a lot more practical angle than the mountain. "I went out and photographed some branches in the winter forest.", says Tuomas. "I dug the grass out of my personal dark history of fiddling with Warhammer figures."

Quite a lot of material had to be procuded in 3D to create the desired feel of depth and perspective. Even though the trunk is photographed, Turkka created the leaves along with other objects in the scene in 3D. "Having enough elements in various distances together with the right depth of field blurring created a nice miniature feel to this one.", says Tuomas.

"While working on the series we found better and better ways of doing things.", Tuomas says. "The more objects you build in real life, use doll house objects and whatever you can imagine, the better and faster you're able to create the pictures. 3D and Photoshop are just tools for bringing the world together while maintaining the possibility to change things without starting from a scratch. This is a really fun series to do, a breath of fresh air into the routine of working with a pen and a computer."

Credits

Client: Nissen

Agency: TBWA\PHS
Creatives: Jouni Seppänen, Ilkka R. Ruotsalainen, Mikko Torvinen, Pinja Metsäkoivu, Miika Kumpulainen, Antti Heimo
Project Manager: Kaisa Kinnunen
Producer: Kirsi Pärni