The arrival of Santa Claus gets the Christmas party started at Reply. In a nutshell, the creative idea of ​​Bitmama relies on the emotional engagement generated by the expectation of an event, that joyful feeling that nourishes the positive nature of the party. Linear storytelling is visually supported by characters and elements capable of evoking the iconic imagery of Christmas, creating a context that is easily recognisable by a very heterogeneous audience.

From a technical point of view, we decided to create 3D content from a “concept art” based on the classic two-dimensional illustration. The reasons for this choice are the creative freedom and rapidity of change that 3D allows, two sought-after factors in productions with a short deadline. The tangible perception of these aspects is highlighted by the making of the final animation, which allowed the duration to last less than a minute.

WAITING FOR THE PARTY. 3D ANIMATION BREAKDOWN

After evaluating the technical alternatives, with the approval of the art direction, we decided to proceed with the so-called “2.5D” perspective, which consists of a real 3D animation, visually simulating a two-dimensional space, restricting the movements of the camera on a single plane, regardless of framing changes. This feature ended up characterising the main artistic challenge: to give the plastic traits typical of traditional animation to the characters and the merry-go-rounds on stage.

The production followed the workflow of a classic 3D graphic pipeline: layout -> modelling -> shading -> rigging -> animation -> lighting -> rendering.

The flexibility of 3D in creating content for communication offers many advantages. Using the same 3D framework used to make the video, graphic materials were also created for communication on social networks (artworks, banners, etc.) consistently with the entire Bitmama campaign. Conceptually speaking, once “3D is built”, it is possible to derive many different production outputs from it, while maintaining perfect stylistic coherence. In practice, this allows a drastic optimisation of development times and costs.