Berlin Music Video AwardsLACA Film FestivalLos Angeles Animation FestivalUnknown Film Festival

2.2 M plays and more than 7000 comments on Youtube

A music video for a Russian singer Zemfira telling a story about the butler Austin — main character of the Hopescapes game — who had a nightmare.

We decided to move Austin to the CG world and show his true feelings and emotions. We believed that such realism would work really well, allowing the audience to come as close to Austin as never before.

Storyboard

We started thinking through the storyboard and boardomatic together with director Lesha Krupnik.

The more we worked on storytelling the more we realised that linear narrative will work the best in this particular case. It gave us the freedom to address all the problems that Austin faced in the game itself.

Concept Art

We suggested that we create a fully CG character — we believed it would work really well because no one ever saw Austin and his troubles in such close proximity before. In order to make sure we chose the right path, we started with creating concepts. As a result, we decided to create the whole video in real-3D, mostly for the sake of consistency of the visuals.

Character Design

The video reveals characters of different levels of elaboration. Most of the time was spent on Austin and Catherine, as we recreated them from scratch and made rigs for them. In addition to these characters, the video features Austin's parents in the form of statues, the crowd at the auction and the buyer.

We spent a lot of time working on the main character Austin as we used him to figure out and master the styles of all other characters.

One of the storytelling clashes was the scene where Austin meets his doppelgänger. Specifically for this scene, we created two versions of the character — the usual and the old one.

We decided to keep Austin’s original look and recreated his original clothes in every detail — even the buttons. In order to capture the events of the video, we also created different versions of Austin’s look that had various amounts of dirt on the clothes.

We tried to base Kathrine’s character on photos of actresses and it took us a while to figure out how we can add just a bit of spice to that simple girl. Visualisation, rigging, hair simulation, and melting of Kathrine were created by the guys from ZHEESHEE.

Kathrine’s dress idea was developed from scratch in order to highlight the erotism of the scene. We only kept the green color from her original look.

Another challenge was to create realistically looking parents based on characters from the game. We were striving to achieve a balance between making them look real and keep them close to the original version.

Besides statues and sculptures that look like his parents, we created picturesque portraits of family members and gave them luxurious framing. This way the image of parents literally follows Austin throughout the whole video.

The house

The most valuable thing Austin owns is his family mansion. Being inspired by the Victorian age and the original house from the game, we created the mansion literally from the scratch. There are three versions of the mansion in the video: the original, the burnt down, and the model at the auction.

Animation and simulation

This stage was one of the most time-consuming. Every scene of the video has a simulation: clothes, liquids, fire, destruction of the floor and the walls. We went through a long stage of iterations with every simulation, aiming for the desired level of realism. Since Austin almost always interacts with these simulations, the creation of character animation has become more complicated

Lighting and camera

There is a dominant color in every scene to immerse the audience into the character’s emotional state. Thanks to having a camera director Andrey Nikolaev on the project, we were able to direct the light and move the camera as if it were a real-life set.

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Credits

Music Artist

Zemfira

Client

Playrix

Agency

Koshta

Art direction by

Petrick

CG by

Petrick

ZHEESHEE

Written & Directed by

Alexey Krupnik

Executive Producer

Evgenia Afanaseva

Line Producer

Tatyana Patrenina

Playrix's Team

Maxim Kirilenko

Victoria Ustinova

Alexey Vinogradov

Color Correction

Timofey Goloborodko

Sound Design

Jan Pavelchuk

Petrick Team

Creative Producer

Nadya Petrick

Creative Director

Misha Petrick

Art Director / CG Supervisor

Oleg Kulinich

Production Designer

Ruslana Mirzaalieva

Animation Director

Ilya Buzinov

Look Development

Oleg Kulinich

Pasha Ho

Alex Petrovsky

Roman Novak

Sasha Sanakoev

Costume Design & Props

Sergei Ryzhov

Evgeniya Petrova

Title Design

Ksusha Belobrova

Sculpting, Modeling & Grooming

Ilya Dyadyura

Andrey Lizunov

Alexandr Melentiev

Sasha Sanakoev

Rigging

Ravshan Gaziev

Sasha Sanakoev

Animation

Denis Afanasiev

Ibragim Botashev

Anna Pozdeeva

Lenar Singatullov

Sergey Pereskokov

Natalia Matyushenko

Ilya Buzinov

Vova Orlov

Simulation & Effects

Stas Khodjaev

Vitaly Antonovas

Sasha Sanakoev

Slava Reznik

Aleksey Pershin

Oleg Kulinich

CG Generalists

Oleg Kulinich

Lenar Singatullov

Alex Petrovsky

Sergey Pereskokov

Alexandr Melentiev

Kirill Panteev

Zheeshee Team

Creative Director / CG Supervisor

Artem Shcherbakov

Producer Assistant

Daria Neustroeva

Creative producer

Alexey Novikov

Lead Animator

Frederico Navarro

Rigging

Alexandr Smirnov

Animation

Lyubov Tsymbalyuk

Vladimir Hakobyan

Yan Aghavelyan

Elena Marchenko

Alexandra Limina

Simulation & Effects

Andrey Bibartcev

Alexandr Korshakov

Ruslan Ziganshin

Grooming

Oleg Nechaev

Clean Up

Maxim Tcheslavsky

HeadHunter

Renovation

HeadHunter

Flower Shop

HeadHunter

Coffee Shop

Rovio

Angry Birds

Zemfira, Playrix

Austin

Ivan Dorn, WWF

Wild

Unofficial

Gus Dapperton

Unofficial

Caroline
Polachek

Unofficial

Sevdaliza

Tretyakov Gallery

Russian
Fairytales

Tinkoff

Anniversary

Tinkoff

Eco Challenge

Yota

Family

Committee Against Torture

Police Cartoons

Lego

Birthday Studio

Rocketbank

Arcada

Motion Design School

What Is Motion
Design School