Feature: Twelve Days of Animation

By Rodney Appleyard

When The Post Lounge created a funny Twelve Days of Christmas animation last year, they sent it to their clients for a bit of fun.

“Austereo, being one of our clients, saw it and decided they wanted to create a series of TVCs in a similar style for Triple M Sydney's The Grill team,” The Post Lounge creative director Zenon Kohler says.

And so a new TV commercial campaign was born.

The animation in the 30-second TVC, which was inspired by Terry Gilliam's Monty Python sketches, mimicked the appearance of 3D stop motion animation.

It ended up looking like an old-school miniature set had been constructed from scans of cardboard, sticky tape, photos of buildings, textures and various different objects, all pieced together in a way that appears hand-made.

“The edges all have rough cuts and tape is stuck haphazardly to help sell this hand-made feel,” explains Kohler. “But by making it digitally, instead of using stop motion animation techniques, we had the flexibility to change the animation, the camera moves and all the things you don’t get to do if you shoot it.

“When you make a TVC, that flexibility is very helpful, especially when you need to make changes, or you have an extra funny idea that you want to incorporate into the set.”

All the sets, characters and objects were designed in Photoshop. The 3D set and characters were constructed and animated in After Effects.

“It was designed on the fly, which is actually a more efficient way of creating the effects because you can modify your elements immediately and easily. With a project like this, you are actually designing as you animate,” adds Kohler.

“TVCs are usually on a tight schedule and when you are hand creating every piece from scratch and doing the same job that a dozen crew members from various departments would normally do on set, it takes time to make it perfect. And with this type of animation, it has to be perfect.”

Due to the commercial’s success, The Post Lounge is now creating another in the same style for the Grill team.


The TV commercial campaign for The Grill Team