Sony Ericsson 'Colour Your Life'

In the words of Saatchi & Saatchi ECD Thomas Kanofsky, "In a world full of conformity and mass-standardization, the new Walkman phone lets you have things your way. A chance to customize, individualize and truly express yourself – no matter what, it will definitely add some colour, creativity and inspiration into your life."

Colour Your Life saw Blackmagic Design's 2D and 3D departments creatively collaborating in a unique organic workflow for something quite different from the usual photorealistic VFX job. Based on mood and style references by Melvin Chee from design house Phunkstudio, BMD's animation team breathed life into a collection of colourful 2D creatures.

Due to an extremely tight turnaround the team of Saatchi and Saatchi, Director Harry Patramanis, Play Films and BMD had to adopt a flexible working style towards the development of the animation elements for the spot, commented Play Films Executive Producer David Clarke,

"Timing was our biggest obstacle as we only had 5 weeks from signoff to delivery. The tricky part on shoot was imagining where the animation would be and allowing for it when framing the shots as we didn't have enough time to fully develop the animation prior to shoot. It was a real credit to all concerned that we managed to pull this off in so little time and do it so well."

The creative design process continued throughout the post workflow, even during online new ideas were conceptualized and integrated, as Damien explains,

"We came up with a lot of ideas along the way like the monster that eats the car; the cushion creature that kicks the talent out of the chair; the speaker tree; the pixels that pour out from the TV and the octopus arm that reaches around the talent as she hops down the street. It was really an organic evolution of the concept all the way through as we built up each shot"

Whilst BMD's 2D team were busy designing the colourful array of 2D characters and other elements BMD's 3D team were simultaneously at work tracking all the hand held live action plates ready for compositing. In the end despite, time constraints, all the elements managed to gel together successfully, comments David Clarke,

"Blackmagic were excellent in the passion and flexibility they brought to the job. As we had so little experimentation time prior to the shoot they managed to work the schedule so we were constantly improving as we went along, whilst keeping the clients updated and their expectations exceeded."