Love Story
About the project
Remembering the Good Old Times
We created an animated ad for the Tinkoff City and the Khudozhestvenny Cinema, one of the oldest cinemas in the world.
The plot of our video is a mini-film about love at first sight, in which the Tinkoff City service gradually brings the characters closer to each other. The Art Deco era is an epoch that permeates all forms of art, including fashion, architecture, and cinema. We incorporated this aesthetic not only in the visuals but also in the content of the video.
It was fun coming up with various compositional techniques and camera movements to enhance the emotions in such a short timeframe. For example, it was crucial to emphasize the moment of the characters’ first encounter and make it magical. We approached this task from different angles — animation in a rapid style, camera movements, backgrounds, and a magical change in color.
Character design
Fashion passion
Ruslana Mirzaalieva, character designer:
I had to draw a captivating gentleman from the movies and an innocent beauty. The characters had to look like heroes from the 1930s and, at the same time, be modern. I chose clothing and hairstyles that harked back to the 1930s. However, the dress combination on the girl is fashionable both in the 1930s and today. The feeling of modernity was conveyed through the “wind in the hair” - despite the hairstyles from the 1930s, they are slightly casually tousled, as people like to do these days
Art direction
Color jazz
Sasha Kakora, Art Director:
My goal was to tell a love story through color. It was a true creative challenge because I needed to incorporate Tinkoff’s brand colors and the signature colors of the services featured in our video. I created a picturesque symphony of colors, enhanced by cinematic lighting and magical glimmers that add a special enchantment to each frame
Environment design
Great Gatsby vibes
Sasha Kakora, Art Director:
For inspiration in choosing the style and compositions of the main backgrounds, I turned to the aesthetics of Golden Age Hollywood movie posters. In these posters, the monumentality of forms, bold building angles, and virtuoso color transitions embodied the era of art deco. This era had its unique signature with exquisite details and splendid grainy textures, akin to the soft effect of film
The background style is quite noisy, resembling old illustrations in Art Deco magazines. However, there is depth of field (DOF) from the camera in the video. It was a challenging task to combine these two approaches, but we managed to find an effective solution. The blurring in the frame was executed with special care to emphasize the graphic nature and align with the overall image style
Direction and animation
Love is in the air
In this video, we had very complex characters, realistic proportions, highly refined facial features, and limited production time. To precisely position the 3D shape for the desired pose and accurately track the character’s head shape, I came up with the idea of creating 3D head models. The sculptor created wonderful heads, but in the end, we only used them in one scene. Of course, the producers were not happy with me, but at least we have some beautiful GIFs in the project presentation
