Rightstay by Makemytrip
Project Brief:
The AV is a part of creative campaign to promote Homestay for RightStay by MakeMyTrip. The concept of the homestay is to attract the guests who like to travel and stay in groups during vacation unlike conventional stays at hotels where guests are confined to a room with only 2 guests per room. The only value proposition to communicate via this AV was ‘Staying Together’ while vacationing. The target age group for this campaign was between 24-32 years. We were provided with 30 days for the end to end development of the project.
Production:
The AV was all about experience of travellers in Homestays. It ultimately calls for character driven story. Hence, I went about exploring characters keeping various factors into mind like the target age group, appeal (one of the 12 principles of animation), easy to animate and quick turnaround time TAT which is the most important thing for business.
I remember the essence of very first exercise in animation- The Ball Bounce. Hence, I started with circle as main body for the character and continued a build up on it with simple geometrical shapes for the rest of the body. While designing characters I have followed a minimalistic approach by keeping the facial features to minimum like only moustaches and glasses/sunshades for male and female characters respectively. It serves an opportunity to eliminate the effort of animating eyes, mouth, ears and nose and still good enough to express emotions like happy and sad. Which was a huge save on TAT.
After trying multiple versions of the characters we finally settled with 4 unibody characters which we believe were appealing, expressive, connects with our audience and easier to animate. We named them as ‘Round Trippers’.
Challenges:
I was a budding Motion Designer in the year 2016, when I got this project. I barely had any experience of rigging and animating a character in After Effects. I needed a mechanism to animate my characters with few controls like a control for head turn, one control for animating moustaches, hat and hair of the character all of them in tandem. Hence I learnt about expressions in after effects for the very first time. I explored a few head turn videos in after effects and completed an amazing book ‘After Effects Expressions by Geduld’ in a week. It was more than enough for me to kick start character rigging and repeated animation.
Moodboard:
Character Design:
I always start with pencil and paper before jumping on to computer. Here I have created a character sheet for each character, where I have tried to capture the Front, Profile, 3/4, Up and Down position of each character in different mood and expression along with accessories like shades, cap and headphones. Here, I have tried to achieve minimalist design by using shades and moustaches to communicate various moods. No other facial component.
Storyboards:
Once the storyline, character design and music are finalised, I started planning the storyboards. This is one phase where we do a lot of back and forth in order to communicate the story in quickest and best possible way. Please find below the final storyboards used for this project.
Illustrations:
Final Animations:
