February 12th, 2010
Panda was launching a new Lakumix Berry with real berries and fruit as an ingredient and TBWA\PHS had a concept of an actual Panda bear picking berries in a regular Finnish forest. The idea of the contrast between the Panda and the locale was to be further emphasized with a couple of Finnish bears lurking on the background.
"I knew right from the start that building a proper Finnish forest was going to be a bit of a challenge.", Tuomas Korpi says. "There's a quite limited amount of stock photos available and even less of the bears. And we needed good poses for the bears, too."
Building the composition was largely based on the bear pictures that were picked for the image. Luckily the season was just right and Rami Riihijärvi was able to shoot much of the forest on location in Västilä, Orivesi. "The first version of the picture came out quite easily with the good forest material.", says Tuomas. "The creatives then decided that the documentary-style forest is too bland and we needed to add some fantasy and fairytale in the mix."
First & rough
The bright, sunny day was switched to a cool, early morning and the emotions were cranked up in general: the bears' fur and the trunks of the pine trees were lit with the early morning rays and the meadow got a layer of mist on top of it. "Even though the basic composition was nailed pretty easily there was quite a bit of technical work to do with the forest itself.", Tuomas says. "Layering the berries, heathers and what have you, re-building the lights and shadows and painting some additional elements."
"The finished result is somewhere between a photo collage and a very detailed painting.", Tuomas says. "I used a lot of matte painting tricks to blend all the photo material together. In this sense the creatives choosing a more unrealistic approach to the picture actually made my work a bit easier."
Credits
Client: PandaAgency: TBWA\PHS
Creatives: Ilkka R. Ruotsalainen, Jouni Seppänen, Niko Sinervä
Project Manager: Pia Ekebom