Advertisement: Colour

Concept

“Colour” is a wonderful, traditionally-animated TV advertisement which features an inventive concept, and a melancholic tone that is different from most fashionable ads among recent social media, which fill with more sugar-coated material.

This ad was produced by AKAMA STUDIO for the French TV channel Tiji, which is one of the primary television channels for children under seven years old. The channel’s central mission is to speak to children by engaging their active imaginations. Followed with this purpose, the production team announced that “We probed for an idea that could have been born out of a child’s vivid imagination. In other words, we strove for a concept that could be at the same time funny, poetic and relatable. Whether it was for a child of five, or one of forty-five, whether they were French, English or Chinese, this would be a universal story that would draw upon peoples’ imaginations. We leveraged our creativity to ignite that of the children. This story has the potential to become a children’s classic that can be recounted to children at the zoo or while browsing a book on animals. If pandas and zebras are black and white, it’s because they were forgotten about when the world was being colored in”. (http://www.ddb.com/blog/creativity/tiji-colour/)

Design

This ad basically based on a traditional drawing style, and it began with a world existed only in black and white, like a sketch book for children to paint. After that, as a painting brush dances across the screen revealing vibrant flowers, rich green grass, red fruit in the trees and pink flamingos wading in a pond. The entire world became enriched with colors. The design of nature landscape in this ad tends to be realistic style slightly, plants, rocks, rivers, mountains, all with some certain amount of details. However, the design of animals is completely cartoon style, and the profiles of these animals are much simpler. Furthermore, the vast majority of this ad designed as 2D animation, but in some scenes still can see a bit of 3D effects, which made the whole video more vivid.

Edit/Animation

With a vivacious jazz playing in the background, the editing rhythm of this ad is highly fluent. At the beginning, the music plays in medium speed while the scenes cutting with a consistent pace. Next, when the world became colourful, the music turns to get faster and faster, while scenes switching much more rapidly. At the end of the video, when the panda sadly realized that he was left for giving colour, the music style became slower, and the editing rhythm turned slow too. Audience is also impressed by the richly varied camera movement of this ad. For example, in one of the scenes, the camera followed a running gazelle on African grasslands, then the camera exceeded the gazelle and continued to trace a flying bird until the sunlight fill with the whole screen to finish the scene transition.