April 13th, 2010
When Kimmo Korhonen of King came to Piñata with the project he had very clear idea of what he wanted: the moonlight had brought the prices to life in a nocturnal forest. There would be a hedgehog made of numbers tiptoeing between the trees, a percentage-bird dozingoff in the tree and so forth. The style would be rich and decorative but striking at the same time. Kimmo wanted a fairy-tale fantasia feel to the whole thing without being childish and losing a sense of class and style. All the elements were to be built separate so they could be applied to various needs.
The Print Picture and the Style
In the beginning the biggest challenge were the number characters. We had to come up with a logic to combine animals with numbers while keeping humour in the equation. We were confident that once we get these characters working the rest of the material will be built around them and in their terms.
Tuomas Korpi started sketching the characters first and Mikko Vormala joined in to fill in the blanks. Brett King - the avid typography enthusiast he is - came up with some reference illustrations and ideas for the designs. The first sketches were quite symphatetic and wacky even in a cartoony way but the style was steered to a more decorative and grown-up direction.
"In the end the characters were pretty much a fifty-fifty collaboration between me and Mikko.", Tuomas says. "We found the right style with only a few tweaks and iterations and then followed the chosen path with the colouring and such. The forest was created to follow the same style framing the characters in a nice way."
"This was a really fun project for me to work on since I rarely get to create characters all day long.", says Tuomas. "It was nice finding out how certain numbers as themselves already create a certain character. Just pushing it a bit further with the eyes and the mouth at least made me laugh quite a few times at my own creations."
The Animation
Director Markus Virpiö had created a story and a rough storyboard with Kimmo and Timo Koskinen. On this basis Mikko Vormala created a line-drawing animatic that was used as the template to get the story right. Henri Tani started building his animations in post production while Mikko animated some of the characters - mostly the ones flying or walking on legs - in cell animation.
"In the first few reviews we decided to develop the print look to a more three dimensional direction for the animation.", Mikko says. "We wanted a stronger sense of space and material compared to the illustrations. We came up with a solution of animating the flat 2D elements in 3D space while adding lights, shadows and camera focus into the mix."
"The most interesting part of the character animations was coming up with ways of movement for the numbers.", Mikko says. "A lot of the characters didn't have legs and the shapes and poses of their bodies were way off to begin with as far as animation goes. The numbers had to be readable at all times while they were moving. Some of the characters' general direction was opposite to the direction of the animation and since you just can't flip a number around as you would normally do to a character in animation - well, it was challenging in many ways. We had to come up with natural ways of walking backwards without any legs. It's hard to think of anything to say after this."
Animation
Credits
Client: ItäkeskusAgency: King
Creatives: Kimmo Korhonen, Timo Koskinen
Project Manager: Maarit Haavisto
Production Company: Also Starring
Director: Markus Virpiö
Producer: Johannes Lassila