Brief Explanation

Promoted as The Greatest Toy Sale on Earth, Target required an epic tale set in a child’s bedroom with a fast paced chase scene featuring real & unbranded toys. Special appearances by favourite toys such as Barbie, Ironman and Elsa from Frozen liven up proceedings. Initially it seems like the toys are fighting for the sale catalogue, but they are actually trying to be the one who delivers it to our child – the adorable Ava.

Creative Execution

This fully CG sequence started with 2D hand-sketched animatics to develop the story and character interaction, then 3D animatics with basic shapes progressed the timings and overall shot layouts. An extensive 2D concept phase followed, each shot was designed in detail, with colour palettes and lighting options explored. A visual style was decided upon where we could feature a night time setting but apply hero lighting to our primary toys in a magical environment. This also involved additional light sources strategically placed so we could maintain the integrity of a toy’s original colours throughout each shot. Featuring real toys meant a ‘freshly out of the box’ look, while still needing to imbue a sense of scale with imperfections from manufacturing processes. The Surfacing stage was extensive, picking out tiniest material and texture details such as molding seams, hand-painted elements and finger print smudges which are not obvious but take them away and we would be left with all-too perfect bland CG. Usually we aim for the highest levels of believability, but for this we simply wanted every shot to look rich, vibrant, and magical. And for our hero toys to be the focal point of each and every shot, so we manipulated the lighting, colour palette and grade to suit this purpose. Primarily using 3dsMax with Vray, our vast suite of custom pipeline tools provided the framework for a large team to work efficiently, while freeing up people from the constraints of technology to do this creative, artistic work.