Witness what went into creating the indigenous Rajasthan Tourism ad

When animation and advertising blend into each other, definitely the outcome is enthralling; it is the perfect convergence of ideal platform and creative ideas. Well, a similar kind of magic was manifested recently and we could witness the beauty of this magic all over social media just a few days back.

The special campaign of the tourism company, Rajasthan Tourism, tapped the well known advertising agency Ogilvy and Mather to revamp their logo. And Ogilvy did a notable job by creating the in depth logo based on the tag line ‘Jaane Kya Dikh Jaye!’. But the creation of innovation didn’t culminate there, surely there was more to come on the advertising front.

Ogilvy and Mather, creative director, Mahesh Gharat approached Studio Eeksaurus not with the idea of creating a sand art animation but just to create some commercial for the campaign based on the logo. Studio Eeksaurus, known for its extensive commercials like Google Tanjore and Chintamani were just perfect for this project.

Rajasthan resonates ‘Sand’ and vice versa is what Studio Eeksaurus director, Suresh Eriyat firmly believed. So the Eeksaurus team decided to create Sand art animation or rather Sand sculpting for this commercial. Sand changes form therefore it is easier to rope it in animation as it can be moulded into any shape. But E Suresh wanted to show a bunch of ideas through the ad film, in fact he wanted to show every paramount essence of Rajasthan and tell the audience that you may spot something beautiful in every minute beauty of Rajasthan, after all that is what even the tag line claimed.

Sand art animation is generally created by projecting light from bottom which makes the sand look black. But in this film, Suresh wanted the whole feel to be as bright as the culture of the land of desert. With Rajib Mandal and Dhimant Vyas who is known for his stopmotion work in Shaun the Sheep series, leading the sand art animation, Suresh along with Bargav Sridhar began directing the whole film.

Animating sand demanded a lot of time and everything was hand drawn, hand crafted and hand sculpted at Studio Eeksaurus. This hand drawn work was then refined on computer. Laser cut stencils were made for all the models like the temple, dancing girl, camel or even tiny things like the pot. Everything was sculpted to resonate the feeling of Rajasthan and these stencils were then tapped with clay and covered with sand in order to make it one with the background. Each frame was captured by multiple high end cameras with a lighting setup to reveal every curve inthe sculpture art.

Suresh explains, “Around 400 frames were captured which were frozen at 9 frames per second. The slight movement that you see in the commercial is every frame that has been neatly created with minute detailing.”

All these shots were then put together on Adobe Premiere Pro and the music was added too. A team of 12 artists from Studio Eeksaurus worked for one month in coordination with a number of masterminds from Ogilvy. Music designed by Sameer Uddin and Rajat Dholakia also served as a major player to bring alive the traditional significance of Rajasthan.

This 50 seconds commercial demanded a series of work right from conceptualising, scripting, drawing, clay modelling, sculpting, clean up to shooting and compositing. All said and done, here is the revelation of this masterpiece…