Tbau: How we traveled to the paper mountain

Our new video for drinking water for children has been aired on Russian TV this week. The project appeared interesting to work with  - we managed to try ourselves in a new style and to reveal our creative ideas, that were going to burst out.

In this post we will share some details about the working process on The Tale of Tbau Mountain. Here you will learn a story of a proud mountain Caucasian tur and how we cut, glued, colored and regressed to childhood. 

Our task:

• An image video for a new product of the company: drinking water for children. Duration: 30 seconds
• Developing a recognizable 3D character to present a product

1. Concept

There has already been an image video for 'adult' drinking water Tbau. This is a beautiful mysterious legend about crystal water that is born in the depths of the ancient mountain.

We decided to extend this line in a 'child' project  and to tell children a fairy-tail because they love magic stories so much!

2. Style

A fairy-tail, then? We have some idea, we have been itching to try something new. 

Surfing youtube one day, our CG supervisor found a brilliant work for San Pellegrino brand by French 3D craftsmen

What if we tell our story the same way: with a help of a pop-up book that is popular with children? Besides, paper texture seems attractive - it is a very good 'cover' for a 3D project. 

There was no problem to reconcile such a reference, get down to work then!

3. Storyboard

4. Character

As for the character, from the very beginning the client envisaged it to be a proud mountain Caucasian tur, that had been already used in the image of 'Tbau' brand.

Armed with a graphics pad, our artist eventually gave us a character made of folded watercolor paper.

  

Having defined the image of the Father-tur, with the help of genetic analysis we came to the image of a little Son-tur.

The next step was to convert 2D sketches to a 3D model. Following the chosen decoratory style, we had to make paper-like design, as though the models had been carefully cut out, glued and folded of thick paper.

While texturing we wanted to support watercolor paper material used in the sketch. 

5. Design of the elements. Locations

Having finished with the characters, we got down to development of the space where our story would take place. 

A big story-book, surely, plays the major role in the video. What does a magic book begin with? You are right - with a beautiful cover. Isn't that true, that in our childhood, choosing a book, we first of all paid attention to the cover decorated with an ornament or a beautiful picture. 

Our story is a legend of a mountain, a fairy-tail of oriental character. What is the Orient characterized with? - These are deep blue, sophisticated silver ornaments, stars... At the same time we didn't want to make the book cover visually complex, as far as it would argue with the chosen decoratory style. Besides, we also aimed to add national elements in a form of a characteristic pattern or image. 

We used several references in our work:

 

We came through many variants to get to the final result.

Nevertheless, this is the contents that makes the book. To tell our chamber 30-second book story we developed two 'stages'. Each location was made of thick paper as everything in the video.

Sketches:

The pop-up book was visualized taking into consideration evening light from a desk lamp. We wanted to create a cozy atmosphere of a child room, where a small boy under the blanket was  attentively listening a story.

Preliminary test-render:

We went so deep in the project, that even our children got involved and drew cartoons on our story, some of them were placed on the desk in the video. 

6. Music

There's a rule every video-maker knows: music makes 50% of video's success. A good visual part should be supported with the same interesting  sound. We wanted to find authentic music reference for a story with a national character. Our partner helped us in this, introducing the art of Ossetian music group 'Kyona'.

Result

We are very proud of our work, because we realized many ideas we wanted to show the world. We cannot but remark a big contribution of our partners from Vladikavkaz - they were courageous enough to get deep in the wonderland together with us and participated in creative process during the whole project. 

We also thank the team that worked on this wonderful fairy-tail!