These award winning bumpers were my biggest project at Toxic, and a real defining project for me. It was easily the most ambitious project I'd done in my life so far, and also the most learning and fun. As a consequence it made every project afterwards feel like a real anti-climax. It was this that made me think about where I was going creatively, and that I really wanted to do animation and not post-production. That in the end led me to leave Toxic.
Toxic had been doing bumpers for the norwegian television network TV2 for a couple of years, when we were asked to come up with something for their christmas bumpers. Originally we were to "upgrade" their previous bumpers, that had small people playing happy forest elves. We were very keen on proving that we could to realistic looking 3D characters, so we pitched the idea of doing the bumpers through computer animation. TV2 were very sceptical at first, but after some having proved ourselves through some tests we were good to go.
The bumpers features a traditional norwegian mythological character called the "Nisse", who is something of middle thing between a gnome and an elf. He lives on farms in rural Norway and watches over the livestock and people living there. If you don't feed him properly, he will start misbehaving. I think this character is local to Scandinavia, alghough most old cultures have some kind of "house spirit" that needs to be respected.
The bumpers are very short (4-6 seconds), but we put as much work in it as possible in the time we had available. I thought it was vital that they had a rich textured feel to them, as a more clean look would counter the traditional style we were aiming for. I think the visual style turned out quite nice, they're almost illustrated in a way.
These bumpers won gold in the prestigious Promax World competition in 2006.
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Rune Spaans:
Øystein Larsen:
Frode Ekeberg:
André M. Hitsøy:
Johan Leuf:
Andreas Westin:
Ivar Rødningen:
Kim M. Jensen:
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Art and animation direction, modeling, lighting, matte paint and compositing.
Technical supervision, project management, rigging, effects and lighting.
Modeling, textures, logo animation.
Modeling, textures and rigging.
Modeling and animation.
Animation.
Character design, modeling.
Sound.
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