Some notes from NAKD on Cheil Worldwide Canada's Samsung campaign:

When we saw the brief for the Samsung Hands spots, we knew immediately that it was a project we wanted to be involved in. The creative was inspiring, open ended and full of potential. Our early enthusiasm was reaffirmed by Cheil's creative team who were a genuine pleasure to work with, always remaining open and responsive to our ideas and input.

Created over a period of 6-8 weeks The two :30s fully CG spots feature Samsung's flagship mobile phone products arranged into sets of hands that animate across a range of universal hand gestures —The claim being that Samsung's products give you tools to 'Express Yourself'. The first spot, co-branded with Toronto FC, puts the hands in the context of a Soccer game.

From the outset we wanted to capture some of the fluidity and nuance of real human hands and avoid ending up with something that felt stiff or robotic. We designed the hands in a way that permitted maximum flexibility and the widest possible range of motion. Early in the process, we shot HDV reference footage for each of the key scenes and hand poses and cut together an animatic using a scratch track for timing.

One of the key challenges for our animators was to avoid the effect of disembodied hands, even though our hand models only reached elbow length. To help with this our animation rigs included a shoulder set-up and proxy bodies to help maintain realistic spatial relationships in scenes with multiple hands.

With 15 unique phone models to contend with, 60 high resolution phone models per hand and some 3D scenes containing as many as 50 hands, we knew in advance that we'd need a flexible pipeline that would allow us to work on animation independent of the lighting and rendering process.

Working in 3DSMax, we constructed a lightweight animation rig for each hand as well as a matching hi-resolution rig for lighting and rendering. Using this system we were able to point cache the animation from the animation rig and use that to drive the hi resolution mesh. This system allowed us to efficiently update animation right up until sending our final scenes to render.

Lighting and optical camera effects were added in After Effects as well as various animated graphic elements in the openings and end-tags of each spot. The spot was created using 3dsmax 2008, Vray 1.5 SP2 and After Effects CS3



 Campaign Background from Cheil Worldwide, Canada:

Words like ‘dependable’ and ‘reliable’ were used by consumers when they were asked to describe the Samsung wireless brand. And while Samsung is very proud of this reputation, they wanted to elevate and build on that image so that they were also known for their innovative features and cool designs that suit just about any personality and lifestyle.

The aim of Samsung Canada’s 2008 Wireless Advertising Campaign ‘Express Yourself’ is to form an emotional connection with its target by creating universally understood hand signs using Samsung’s extensive line of mobile phones. These hand expressions visually convey that Samsung has phones that suit any lifestyle. If you love music, choose an mp3 phone. Text-aholic? Get a Samsung with a QWERTY keypad. And if you’re the creative type, there are phones with digital and video cameras.

Simply put, Samsung mobile phones allow you to express yourself.