60 seconds with Mill Creative Director Ross Urien on crafting a magical spot for Siemens

We recently collaborated with Publicis and Anthony Mandler out of Tempomedia Filmproduktion GmbH on Siemens most recent campaign. The spot sees a child’s bedtime story come to life through the power of Design and VFX.

Mill Creative Director Ross Urien states “The idea behind this project was to create a shadow like character that comes to life to life while a mother tells her daughter a bedtime story. Originally we were going to create a puppet but the director Anthony Mandler, wanted Katie (the character) to come out of physical walls and run around the room freely – so we decided on a semitransparent character that could do both things (be a shadow and also an independent character in other shots…)

Firstly our concept artist Silvia Bartoli designed the characters look and personality, we tried to keep the style minimal and use simple shapes and some blurry forms. The only facial features we used were the glasses and mouth, just enough to give her expression.

Once we had the design approved, we took it into 2D blocking animation for previs, adding it to the edit we had from the shot as we needed to figure out the speed of Katie and her scale in each shot. It was all hand drawn and animated by hand by our awesome team (Animation Lead Kwok and Carlos, Roly, Marie). We also created an evil character called the sorcerer who brought with him smog and poison into the city. Our team in Bangalore made a wonderful seamless 3D wallpaper and supplied the lighting to go with it.

Jay in flame help to make it all look beautiful and integrated in each shot, so we end up with a 2D character in a photo real environment, it was stylised but worked incredibly well.

The main challenge of the job was to find the right balance between the right balance between the real world and the animation world as we didn’t want to the character over take the live action.”

You can get in touch with our VFX & Design Studio to discuss your upcoming project via our contact page.