Digi’s musical discovery

The Skinny

Digi Music was the advertising campaign for Digi’s web and mobile music service, which offers unlimited music downloads. The television commercial’s tagline was ‘Discover Yourself’. Every scene begins with a grey and white background and then when music is played, the commercial comes to life in a whole new polygon world in colour.

The Digi Music commercials demonstrate that you can do all the things you’ve always wanted to do with your life right now. It celebrates moments as an opportunity to do more, get more and be more.

Grey KL advertising agency created the advertising campaign based on DiGi’s overall proposition of ‘Discover Music with anyone, anytime, anywhere’. The television commercial storyboard was based on scenarios people can relate to. They tested the storyboard with youths and the feedback they got was that they can relate to the scenarios; for example the driving lesson scene. The scenarios takes you through happy moments and very challenging times as well and this campaign touched several aspects of growing up and moving along.

The Production

Shot in and around Kuala Lumpur (KL) locations ranged from a busy street in KL to a parking lot, a dance studio, a huge open space where cows graze and a stadium in Bukit Jalil. The scenes eventually had to be created in 3D. They had to be built in white polygons and because of that the team had to shoot in locations around the country and a variety of locations were chosen to tell the story.

Most of the shots had a moving camera and that made it far more challenging. Every character that was shot in real life and had to be rotoscoped. This was a tedious process but we were very thankful that tigertiger had a team dedicated to doing that. The work was separated during the online process and groups did specific parts to ensure a faster workflow.

The most memorable scene of the commercial was the ‘guy at the concert’. This was where the guy walks through the tunnel and you see the scene where he joins his friends only to realize that he is at a concert.

The scene was also the most time consuming because it was a one-take deal. The action had to be timed correctly because there was only so much time or limited amount of seconds to tell that scenario. That scene was well worth it as it was a great way to finish the commercial.

Everything was shot on ultra prime lenses to keep as much details as possible. This was so that the rotoscoping process would be easier. The pictures and lighting conditions were all naturally exposed to retain as much information as possible so that the team had more control at the post process.

The Post

The state of the art equipment at tigertiger post was useful. For all vector based, polygon structures After Effects was used. The white background landscapes were created in 3D Maya, all rotoscoping was done on a combustion software, the final online finish was done on Flame 2009 and the colour grading was done on the Da Vince Resolve 2K.

The processed film was put through the film scanner (The Director) which scanned out 2K bit DPX file sequences. The files were then stored on SAN (Storage Area Network), the heart of operations. A 1-lite color grading process was done so the colour of the 2K scans were balanced. A color balanced, PAL sized proxy was then fed back into the SAN.

The proxies were then ingested into Final Cut Pro editing system and editor Nik Johann began cutting together the various shots. The multiple EDLs (Edit Decision List) were then generated for the various systems when the edit was completed.

The EDL and original scans were then bought into the DVO (Digital Vision Optics) system. The scans were then conformed, degrained and enhanced before a second set of high resolution images were created.