CRED - Not An Ad feat. Chacha Chaudhary & Suppandi
CRED had been actively using icons from the 90s like Rahul Dravid, Venkatesh Prasad, Anil Kapoor, Govinda, Kumar Sanu, and others for their ads with Jim Sarbh – which made us realise that there was an exciting opportunity at hand for Bakarmax.
They had covered Bollywood, Music, and Sports as a category but Comics was not yet tapped into. And given that CRED’s primary audience are the millennials who grew up during the 90s, what was more iconic than characters like Chacha Chaudhary, Suppandi, Sabu, etc who we had all fallen in love with back in the day!?
This is what inspired us to reach out to them and pitch this approach where they could explore animation as a medium for their next ad using these popular comic characters and also bring in a new dimension into their series of ads which were always live action.
We can proudly say that we brought this project to life in its entirety – from approaching the CRED team and pitching them the idea, securing the rights to both the iconic characters of Chacha Chaudhary and Suppandi, to writing as well as animating the entire film. We did it right here.
The setting of the ad was the same – Jim Sarbh style – to build recall. But everything else after that was something completely new for CRED and something their audiences weren’t expecting either.
It was great when we received positive feedback from everyone at CRED, Pran Features, and Amar Chitra Katha when we pitched bringing Chacha Chaudhary and Suppandi into this new world where they were not just talking to kids anymore but actually adults.
And it was a dream project for the entire team that got to work on it – even got our blood pumping in excitement for those Mondays!
Here is how it happened.
Storyboard
Also called an animatic, it is something that makes the process of animation stand apart from live action. Here, after the script, using rough drawing, scratch voices we create the final product and polish it till we have what we all agree on.
In animation, we don’t have the luxury of rough footage. We animate only the bits we need – we don’t animate even the 1 extra second. This is where the client can give as much feedback as they want – they work as partners to polish the story.
Character Designs
Suppandi is one of the most popular Indian comic characters and has seen enormous changes in terms of design over these years. We kept more aspects of Suppandi creator, Waeerkar’s design in our film. But the fun part was to imagine Suppandi in un-Suppandi-like scenarios and see him in multiple costumes.
Colour Keys
Colour keys do the same thing as storyboards, but for colour. By rough colouring the main scenes, we get an idea of what our film is going to look like.
Sometimes, colour keys also create an accidental mix of colours, lights and shades which we might not have thought of on purpose. And as all of this is rough at this stage, it allows us to change and move quickly.
Backgrounds
As we were working on the backgrounds for our CRED animated film, an interesting conflict arose – should the backgrounds be painted or they should have line art, looking similar to the characters?
Now, one interesting thing most people outside of animation don’t notice is that shadows in animation is difficult. In fact most TV animation does not have shadows on characters, but backgrounds are made so delicious that viewers don’t notice. (Reference: Big City Greens (2018))
In backgrounds, you either can choose BG with line art – making the characters and the world merge, Or Painted, like most Japanese animation.
We obviously preferred painted backgrounds and our client was nice enough to go over all this with us. We finally chose painted.
Final Film
Here is the final film we created for CRED!
Making Of
The making of the film had a team of talented artists and icons like Raghubir Yadav and Suresh Menon who helped us bring this project to fruition. Here is a glimpse of what all that went into it.
Podcast
Listen to what the production team behind the CRED film have to say about their journey – from ideating it to getting into a conversation with Amar Chitra Katha to all the work that went into finally creating the film. And what they think this project could mean for the animation industry in India.