PANDA - CADBURY GEMS SURPRISE
This TVC was done with the Indian director Vishal Mangalorkar, and was on air in India. In this TVC two Pandas are eating Cadbury Gems under a tree. They soon discover that the Gems ball are not only containing sweets but also include some Ben 10 plastic figures. This is probably the most difficult commercial I have done so far, as the artistic and technical requirements were so high !

The commercial was shot in a natural park in Khao Yai, Thailand, using a RED camera. 4 actors were playing the pandas. The heat in the costumes was so high that the actors had to be switched at the end of every shot.


Building the head of the pandas was quite difficult as there was very little reference on the internet or books. The big amount of hairs on the face made it difficult to find the exact shape of the head and skin under the hairs. At the end, the modeling was based on white polar bears - hairs are less puffy - (even if the panda isn't classified as a bear but as a family of raccoon) and skeleton references of pandas.

The director wanted the pandas to look very dumb. We went through many pre-approves with the director to make sure we found a correct look that pleased us both. Once the commercial was shot and we got the fullgrade, we had to do further adjustments on the hairs style as we had to match the costume on the footage.

The Pandas were rendered with 3d Studio Max using the default Scanline Renderer. No GI was used, just a huge amount of light projecting soft shadows. The compositing was done with After Effects. The animation was done by Alejandro Garcia.

During the shooting I took a series of HDRI Data that was used to create both the lighting and reflections on the hairs. The pictures were taken with the custom tripod head that was build for previous projects.

The pandas had to play with Ben 10 Characters that came out of the Gems Balls. The models were based on the real toys but the modeling had to be refined because the scale was much bigger and therefore we could see more details. The rendering was done with Vray. At Digital Magic we recently made the acquisition of Vray RT which was of great help while doing the shading of the Ben 10.

The models were then tracked over dummy models. The dummy models were built with foam and painted in blue to be keyed and remove easily.

Here is the making of the commercial showing the different technics involved in its creation :