Fairy 'Bizzie'

Director: Paul O'Brian
Production: Framestore Pictures
Agency: Saatchi & Saatchi
Client: Fairy

One of those rare opportunities where a brand decides to bring a big change to their connection to audiences by bringing their traditional character to life in a new and modern world. A journey that, if done well, will last for years to come and bring enormous success to the brand.

We started doing some concepts and trying to understand where we could take it, as usual, it is challenging to convert a 2D image into a 3D model, volume, profiles and more importantly, inventing what has never been seen from certain angles requires a lot of back and forth but our concept artist did a great job and after several iterations we presented our interpretation of Bizzie in 3D to the agency.

The work was done in Photoshop, so it was not fully 3D yet, but with the concept approved we started the process of building Bizzie in Zbrush and together with the concept artist we revisited and refined it until we had a truly 3D version of Bizzie for the agency and client.

Build

Once approved, we started the conversion to 3D by modelling in Maya, rigging it for animation and Houdini for rendering using Arnold.

We built a Tpose turntable to best understand the design and how volumes evolved, something that was extremely delicate as this character was never seen other than in profile and the previous installations in which it was 2D animated were obviously less volume accurate.

To showcase the charm of the character, we also built it in a friendly, relaxed pose that showed his attitude and appeal. After all, it is not every day we see someone on a Tpose standing on the street, so this was very helpful.

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Once the design was aproved, we started work on the environment as well based on the storyboard design to make the previsualization super accurate, given this was a real build we were about to film, we could take advantage of all the construction measurements coming from the 3D scene, so our Maya modeling team and the previsualization team did a great job making sure what we wanted to film was actually doable with the camera and lenses we chose, and that the story flowed correctly.

With all this information, we knew exactly the timings and went with a full plan to film the whole thing in a day. The animatic was precise enough to build just the necessary elements on set and streamline the process.

Shoot

The shoot was super smooth, given the preparation we did, so we just needed to make sure the lighting was great and that the director and agency were happy.

Execution

As we progressed with the previsualization so much, we took it into animation and with the final character and rig, the animation team started to work on it, getting the most of the fun character. And it was great fun to animate him. Bizzie was alive!

In parallel, the lighting and FX team worked hard on making sure the character looked great, the contact, shadows, fx, splashes were all as planned, and the main focus we realised was that the challenge was the level of grease as the balance between dirty and unappealing was very fine. Several iterations allowed the director to refine it, and together we found the sweet spot.

Finally, the compositing team worked to finesse the final images that would make the film as you see it, bringing Bizzie to life in 3D, which I am sure is the first of many to come.

Conclusions

What I am most proud of is to have managed to re-imagine Bizzie, the beloved character drawing and build what I think is a super successful rendition that surely will last the test of time, can't wait for more adventures and seeing how, in the capable hands of the agency's creative team, this is the start of a long journey that will give us endless fun.

Who said a TV series?