Moving in sync

1 April 2008

The Skinny
MFX produced a design heavy spot in conjunction with Saatchi & Saatchi Malaysia, commissioned by Guiness Anchor Berhad to celebrate the Tiger Beer brand’s 75th anniversary. The TVC, titled Tiger 75 Years introduces the newly launched bottle with limited edition design from Saatchi & Saatchi, for Malaysia. The TVC’s underlying proposition was to reflect the look of the print ad campaign, also originally conceptualized by Saatchi & Saatchi.
Adopting a “fresh, urban and hip” approach to target audiences including the youth and revellers, the 30-second ad features highly stylized animated properties in the brand’s colours and shades of blue and gold, akin to a flurry of fizzling bubbles, confetti and ribbons set against silhouettes of the cityscape and dancers.
All the elements are changing quickly to the beat of the increasingly loud, fast and powerful tune played by an electric guitar, set against audio visualization resembling an oscilloscope vibrating in-sync with the music’s changing volume and frequency spectrum.
The oscilloscope has been stylized to emit a fluid-like flow and drip similar to overflowing beer at various parts of the line, while the spikes increasingly expands in magnitude to reveal the new design of the Tiger Beer bottle in the background.
The Production
For production of the animation-focused spot, the team at MFX used the Adobe suite of software including Affer Effects and Photoshop to accomplish the bulk of the work. The dancers’ silhouettes were also produced with actual footage of live dancers shot by the team.
According to senior designer and animator Pitt Ong, animating to the pace of the music and synchronizing between the visual and audio components were the main challenges of the project. “Like with all audio-video sync work, we had to manually mark out the key points of the audio piece including the main beats and rests, and use those as key turning points for the animation,” said Ong.
Ong also revealed that through the two-week long production timeline, the team at MFX worked closely with the creatives from Saatchi & Saatchi Malaysia to examine and continuously tweak the work to ensure the “flow” of the entire TVC was maintained.
Elements including the meshing of scenes from one to the next, the speed of transitions as well as the smoothness of the animation developments were the key areas that were worked on to ensure the TVC was able to bring the message and branding across well.
The Post
Budgeted at under US$25,000, post production of Tiger 75 Years saw the team place great emphasis in selecting the right dance footage used. The material was then colour graded and matched to the established colour palette before being integrated into the TVC.
Overall, Ong found that the team had to constantly ensure that the TVC’s focus remained on the brand rather than let accompanying elements including the dancers take centrestage. He said, “We did have some difficulty ensuring that the ‘hero’ of the piece was the brand rather than the dancers as they are meant to support the message and brand, not the reverse. It’s about juxtaposing the graphic elements to attract audiences to the brand but not allowing them to outshine the brand image on-screen.”