Everything starts from a concept or an idea. Here, it was to represent a toon character that plays with some items while he is going from point A to point B. I came up with the idea to create a character that looked to be drawn on lined paper. It's kind of easier said than done at first when you don't know the procedure, so here are the steps that led me to the final result.

Québon chocolate milk is a division of Natrel in the province of Quebec, Canada. Milk is an essential food and nothing compares with the taste of Québon milk. This makes it something really interesting to make a TV spot for children. The objective of the campaign was to demonstrate that you can win some special prizes if you drink some Québon chocolate milk, and that you have to go to a certain website to participate.

The four principal prizes were a mountain bike, an iPod, some clothing and a digital-camera. I had to work hard and closely with Spoutnik marketing to come up with a good storyboard to show all these aspects. We also had to consider the fact that this spot was intended for kids. While working together we've come up with the idea to make everything in a cartoon world with a hero character. The slogan "Veux-tu sortir avec moi", which means ''Do you want to hang out with me'', was ideal to bond the product with the whole scenario of the campaign. It worked perfectly because kids and young adults are in the age of experiencing their first love. The whole combination of milk, prizes, kids' first love and the product would altogether form the soul of the spot.

The client wanted the character to be a stickman and wanted to know if it was possible to animate such a character. I had to spend a day to model and animate the character. After 10 hours of work I came up whit this using my favourite 3D software XSI and After Effects.

Happy to see that it was possible to do such a thing, the client wanted to see my vision of this world. The whole idea starts with a kid in a classroom who his daydreaming at his desk. The kid wasn't listening much to the teacher, so he draws a character on his class work and some other elements in relation to the spot: mountains, words and phone numbers. We are then plunged into his dreamworld that he has drawn on the lined paper. It took me 3 days to build the cartoon pipeline and I came up with this.

Really happy with the look, the client asked me to do the storyboard and character design. The story had to involve the four prizes that you can win when you buy some chocolate milk. I wanted to have some fun with the character, so I came up with a wild story. At first, we see the hero drinking some milk and he instantly wins a new mountain bike. He takes his new bike, goes down the hill of a mountain and jumps a giant cliff. While in the air, he drinks some more chocolate milk and wins an iPod. With the new power of his iPod he lands on the street and starts dancing. Our hero then meets a girl who's pretty homely at first. But she is drinking some chocolate milk too, and wins some new clothes. The now-pretty girl makes our hero jiggle for her so he takes some pictures of her with his new digital camera. At the end, he asks ''Do you want to go out with me'' and the website address is shown.

These are the first renders of the environments. You can't put too many details in the environments and the characters because you will end up with a lot of unwanted lines. Keep it simple. For the animation everything runs smooth and I didn't encounter any problems at all.

Here I am going to explain the pipeline from XSI to After Effects to get the final result, and I'll assume that you have at least one model in your scene (ex: a cube) to follow along. The pipeline that I am going to explain doesn't need a lot of computer power and it is pretty quick to achieve the final result, which is something that I always want.

XSI

Put a constant pure green color on all your scene material.
Set the Ambience to pure white.
On the Lens Shader of your camera put a Toon_Ink_Lens with the following setup. Always remember to make your entire models suitable for your toon render. More edges equal more and more lines to draw for the Toon Ink shader. Your settings have to be optimal.

Make a first render sequence with no shadow and call it GREEN. Note that you can add textures while you're at it
Then make a second render with Shadows ON but take OFF the Toon_Ink_Lens and the textures. If you do a Quickrender you will see that everything is green except the shadows. Render the shadow-only sequence and name it SHADOW. This is going to be used later in the compositing. I could have used a black on white sequence and then import it in After Effects as a Matte but this technique did not give me enough flexibility on the scale of the shadow.

After Effects

Import the 2 separate render sequences in After Effects.
Put the GREEN sequence in a new composition.
Use you favourite Keyer to erase all the green from GREEN sequence. Now you are left with only the pencil stroke and the textures.
Put a white background for the moment. For this project I have scanned my favourite stack of lined paper. As you see you can put any background by now and your toon character will be on top of it. Think about something that an artist would use as a canvas to draw or paint on.
For the lined shadows I have used a simple all lined blue sheet that I have scanned. Remove all the background in Photoshop and keep only the stroked lines using an alpha channel.

Import that layer in After Effect and make an animation of 3 frames or more with it in a new composition, and name it LINEDANIM. The idea is to get a simple composition with moving lines.
Put the SHADOW sequence in the composition. Remove all the green from the SHADOW sequence with your favourite Keyer.
Put the LINEDANIM composition under the SHADOW sequence.
On LINEDANIM use the SHADOW sequence as an Alpha matte. And Voilà! You have lined shadows.
For the 4 corners shadow I have used a simple layer made in Photoshop.

Here's the final spot.

To finish this I have made a Making Of video.

I hope this tutorial helped you a bit. Good luck in your own projects! This spot took me 1 month and 1 week to do from start to finish, including all the approvals. The spot was broadcast on Music Plus for 1 month, 10 times a day. I hope this shows that even on your own, you can come up with something decent.

Here are some other examples:
Nike Battlegrounds - 1
Nike Battlegrounds - 2

I am looking for a new job. To see other projects made by me you can go on my Main site

I am looking for a new job.
To see other projects made by me you can go on my Main site