Trivandrum based Toonz Animation has created the 3D avatar of the iconic utterly butterly delicious ‘Amul Girl’. Conceived in 1967, this young, chubby Indian girl dressed in a polka dotted frock with blue hair and a half pony, has been the face of Indian dairy brand Amul since.
And now, after more than 4 decades of fascinating us in her hand drawn form, the ‘Amul Girl’ has adorned a 3D avatar in Amul’s latest TVC. Released by the Gujarat Cooperative Milk Marketing Federation, the TVC is created by Kailash Pictures whereas the 3D animation, motion graphics and compositing have been delivered by Toonz Animation. The live action cum animation TVC is currently airing on leading television channels
AnimationXpress.com caught up with Hari Varma, Chief Creative Officer of Toonz Animation to know about the making of Amul’s mascot in 3D and more.
How did this Toonz land up this amazing opportunity of bringing Amul Girl to the animation medium?
Creator of ‘Amul Girl’, Rahul DaCunha and Jayen Mehta-General Manager of Amul India, had this fancy of giving a complete 3D make over to the Amul Girl mascot .For taking this idea ahead, we’ve had couple of discussions with them. Hearing about the 3D idea, we carried out a lot of design research. And, one day, Rahul shared the idea of animating the 3D Girl in Live Action Ad by Kailash pictures, which I found to be very interesting. We then met Kailash, heard his plan of action for the ad and then jump started work on it.
The initial concept was jointly told to me by Rahul and Kailash. They just wanted to target the children. And Kailashji was clear that he wanted us to create a colorful dream for kids filled with fantasy.
Could you give us a deeper insight into the research that went into this project?
We knew that we are taking a huge risk of converting a well accepted and lovable 2D art of the Amul Girl created by Sylvester DaCunha and known to the world for many decades! We had actually started working on creating the Amul Girl in 3D almost a year back keeping in mind to create a full Stereo 3D ad.
What about the look and feel of this TVC?
It was Kailashji’s direction to make the ad look as fantastical as possible. We just went crazy to dream about the fantasy lands, all possible beauty we could create with lot of life, butterflies, fairy castles, colorful dancing fish, aaterfalls, ornate canoe, etc. We wanted to keep a rich color palette with green and other lively colors.
Would you like to share the inspirations that have you taken for the character and background designs in the TVC?
The Amul Girl herself is an inspiration that we didn’t have to look elsewhere. With regard to Backgrounds, we are trained to dream & fantasize. So it was more of visualization. We had to do lot of experimentation for converting the lovable little girl into the 3D version. To our surprise, we realized something very interesting she didn’t have a nose.
Was Production difficult?
The chief challenge for us was to take the cute little girl to the 3rd dimension. We had to do lot of R&D to make it happen without losing her charm. To make the effort more difficult, the shape of her face defies any conceivable anatomy! In the absence of nose, her mouth is actually very near to the eye line making the upper lip as her nose. So we made several versions and tried. We made a proper 3D Amul Girl in 3D with nose, etc. We also tried various versions. We tried to give very subtle blush on her cheeks.
Ultimately, we changed all that and decided to make it look exactly like what she is in 2D without the nose and the upper mouth as the edge of her nose, large teeth, etc. These feature adds ons to the girl was made specially for this TVC. .Also, Kailashji shared suggestions to make her look exactly like the 2D Girl and it worked!
Did you go on the shoot too?
Kailashji shot the ad completely in his studio at Mumbai. Entire shooting of the kids was done in Green Screen and footages then handed over to us for production.
Can we have a credit run down?
Yes! I’m sharing below the Toonz Animation Credit apart from the Shooting Crew at Kailash Pictures.
CG & VFX Director – Hari Varma
Concept Art Direction – Fahad Faisal
CG Supervisor – Vijay Kumar Varkey
CG Producer – Prasanth Nair
Animation Director – Victor Devasagayam
Modeling – Rajesh VT & Team
Rigging – Stani& Team
3D BG & Texturing – Devanand & Team
Animation – Vasanth/Muthu& Team
Lighting &Rendering – Thomas Mali & Team
3D Particle FX – Sreejith& Team
Compositing – Navaneeth Narayanan Olappamanna& Team
Editing – Hari R & Team