ONCE: Father´s Day

ONCE is a non-profit corporate organisation that focuses its activities on the improvement of the quality of life of people with blindness or severe visual impairment from all over Spain. Lottery game products are the ONCE’s economic driving force, with a key annual appointment on Father´s Day. Ogilvy & Mather sent us a great script to pitch for, where a magical magnifying glass searchs all over the city looking for the next winner.

LOOK DEV

One of the agency´s proposals was to develop a piece with specific emphasis on the texture, visually far from digital. They suggested felt , and we got some references of felt figures, like cut-outs and silhouettes. We loved it, but we wanted to make it all 3D. So we developed the following matte paints for the pitch, resembling a town made of felt, all three dimensional.

CITY REFERENCES

We happily got the pitch! Now we have to build an imaginary town. Not recognizable as any particular city in Spain. We searched for commercial areas in photographs of San Francisco, Paris, London…to look for nice streets and colorful facades. Attractive shops with vibrant sunshades. We needed to make sure that our city will bring positive energy without making it childish. We chose lively colors for the commercial facades, and 3-storey buildings (tall enough for the aerial shots) with softer colors on the upper floors and pleasant big windows. We dropped the pitched roofs we originally had in mind and went for flat ones. This way we would get away from the Victorian London of Sherlock Holmes, a bit too dark for our story even if our main character, the magnifying glass, is also a detective.

ANTIQUE SHOP REFERENCES

The toughest was to design the antique shop, full of fantastic magnifying glasses. The magical moment in the commercial starts when the calendar in the antique shop turns its page to Father´s Day and all the magnifying glasses come alive. This scenario needed to feel clean and vibrant. We wanted to avoid dark magic, or even old naphthalene humidity sensation in our shop. It needed to be a bit like a museum and also as a jewelry shop. We dropped many concept arts for the shop, and suddenly someone suggested the “cabinets of curiosities”, encyclopedic collection in Renaissance Europe of bizarre objects, also named “cabinets of wonder”. Then we created our own cabinets, filled with all types of magnifying glasses, surrounding a circular space with a large skylight from where groups of magnifying old glasses hanged like a shoal of quiet fishes floating subtly on air.

CONCEPTS

Once we knew what we wanted for the city, we drawn sets of buildings to use them as a base to construct the streets, and the commercial area.

…Then, we dressed the sets of the different situations reflected on the script…

…And we looked for elements or structures where to place the product claims, so to make sure that texts will integrate within the image.

We placed the antique shop on an alley, away from the main street to bring coziness and mystery. But, again, looking for good vibration. Nothing dark.

Once we were happy with the pencil sketches, we worked on the color scheme.

CHARACTERS

Characters design was also challenging. We started drawing “characters”. But we needed “dolls”. So our humans evolved from cartoon characters to felt dolls to match better our world.

Some matte paints, looking for the felt feeling.

These are our 3D models before shading.

And these are some 3D rendered characters, now posed.

ANIMATIC

The 3D animatic was a crucial tool in order to make sure that we will be able to comprise the story and all situations in just 30 seconds.
We needed to show the magical effect of the magnifying glass when trying to find the lottery winner. Every time we see the world through the glass, situation changes to dreamlike: a woman trying a hat on, that turns to be superb through the lens of the magnifying glass; a couple on a coffee shop suddenly seen in a classy restaurant dinner on the sunset; a guy with his bicycle turning to an exclusive motorbike…All possible lottery winners seen through the eye of our detective…Finally discovering the house of the lottery winner…Of course someone we can´t see yet…