We have just recently finalized a TV commercial for TarOMar flying insect killer product and it will be shown before and after every football game during the World Cup football matches on IRIBTV. The client (Fouman Chimie) wanted us to create an action-filled 30 second long commercial based on a theme they have used in the past to good effect in their marketing.

The ad will be aired for the first time on June 16th 2010 before the South Africa — Uruguay match that takes place at 23:00 local Tehran time. Hope you enjoy it.

The project had a few complex shots which included transformation of the insecticide can into the protagonist robot, shooting blue screen scenes and compositing them into the CG environment and creating a believable CG space where all the action took place.

So here is the initial storyboard as well as some color and lighting tests, done by Kian Kiani, we created for this film which is pretty close to the final result.

TarOMar storyboard 01

TarOMar storyboard 02

And here are some color keys for the room environment:

Color key 01

Color key 02

The rigging and animations were done by Saman Khorram, Bahram Najand was in charge of the layout, shading, lighting and rendering in Max 2009 using Mental Ray.  Adib Souly created the smoke, explosion and rocket effects using mostly Softimages particle and ICE system and the effects were composited in post using Fusion. Faraz Sayyadi did the compositing using Fusion and the most time-consuming shots were the radar-like user interfaces that had to be created and animated layer by layer.The final movie was re-cut and edited by Ali Chenari and Bahram Najand who also took care of the sound effects.

You can see some of the shots of the interior we created here in this post.

We would really appreciate receiving any feedback, comments or critiques on this work so please tell us what you think.

The Annecy International Animation Festival launched yesterday and is currently celebrating its 50th birthday! This is the world’s largest event solely dedicated to animation.The event consists of an animation competition, conferences and a film market (MIFA), in a rather friendly atmosphere where you can meet enthusiasts, professionals, major players and new talents.

You can check out the festival trailer here: Annecy Animation Festival Trailer.

As some of you may have noticed we have recently changed the layout and look of our blog hoping to make it easier to read and a bit more interactive. We apologize beforehand to our blog,  Twitter and Tumblr readers but it appears that our posts may have been re-posted to these sites due to this change. This usually happens because our blog API automatically posts anything we write on our blog to these sites and every time we change our layout we need update our blog posts to include new images, headers and info.

Apparently these services can’t tell the difference between an update and a new post, or I can’t figure out how to keep them from reposting old blog posts. Nevertheless you see our old posts being regurgitated on Tumbler and probably Twitter.

We apologize for this inconvenience but hope that our new layout will make your journey more pleasing and will provide you with a better reading experience.

We are also increasing our post frequency very soon and hope to be able to post at least 3 times a week, providing you with insight into the animation industry, software news and reviews, WIPs and many other interesting information.

We would appreciate receiving any feedback or issues you may have with the new layout so: Tell Us What You Think!

Blur Studio, the creators of great shorts such as “A Gentleman’s Duel” and “In the Rough” have recently completed a ten-spot series of commercials for Pepperidge Farm Goldfish crackers via Young & Rubicam, NY.

I really liked the characters and their animation and the environments look amazing too. The whole thing is CG and directed by Blur’s Leo Santos and you can read the whole story on ItsArtMag.