I brought to life a delicious aesthetic for the packaging of a prime-time slot for ZEE Entertainment.

About

&Prive is an English language channel owned by ZEE Entertainment that broadcasts American and World Cinema, including many recent releases unavailable with any other network. In 2019, they invited me to create show-packaging for their 9PM slot called Bookmarked that had a unique proposition: they intended to air a roster of famous films that were based on critically acclaimed novels.

Working closely with their inhouse On-Air Promotions team, the starting point for this motion graphic was a script based on positioning agreed upon by the Marketing and OAP teams. This was then expanded into a storyboard. I then presented frames from the storyboard rendered in the visual treatment I chose to go ahead with, and some of the research that help arrive at it. This went through numerous small iterations, mainly with respect to how close we could get to the aesthetic that the Marketing team had in mind. I finally developed a sample scene that demonstrated the treatment and the motion, and based on it's approval I moved onto the other scenes.

Treatment Notes

More treatment frames presented before the start of work on motion. I attempted to integrate a unique pipeline for this piece, where the assets were built on Illustrator, animated on AfterEffects, then brought out to Photoshop as individual frames for colour processing (based on average contrast), compiled back in AE and then sent for online VFX for final touchups to a Flame operator. This eventually didn't work because of stylistic reasons and time, and a more conventional colour-grading method was integrated in AE instead.

A quick and dirty storyboard for the mini version to get approvals for revised shot lengths. Hitting the launch deadline was of the essence, and any time that wasn't spent making changes could be allocated to making the animation quality better.

Final Video

Two versions were due as deliverables: a 50-second hero version included here and a mini 15-second version as mentioned above that were to be used as packaging for a scene from the film itself, called Aperitif. There were ten edition of these minis for the first batch, and the source animation files were provided such that the internal team may generate more as required depending on how long this campaign ran for.

Impact

Bookmarked was a motion design project with a tight delivery timeline and numerous iterative revisions due to the many parties involved, but one that I enjoyed putting together.

Bookmarked won Gold in the 'Best Computer Graphics - Animation' category at Promax India 2020.