The spot portrays how Tikkurila wood paints endure the passage of seasons.

The poetic execution combines live-action, stop-motion and time-lapse techniques seamlessly.

The inspirational outcome is brought to close with a pay-off "The Power Of Colours".

The spot portrays how Tikkurila wood paints endure the passage of seasons. The poetic execution combines stop-motion, time-lapse and live-action techniques seamlessly. The animation was captured in-camera – edited from over 95 000 still frames. In the post-production the polishing was kept to minimum in order to emphasize the truthfulness of the project. Only some equipment was later removed from the shots. The animation itself and actions surrounding it was kept in the way it was shot.

The pre-production: after defining the design a full-scale cgi test animation of the story was made. The test was transcripted into a 50-page long instruction document for the real-life execution of it. All the specific stop-motion sequences had their own breakdowns and instructions along with old-school exposure charts. All together over 100 pages of instructions (including a storyboard) were produced for the shoot. The pre-production took 2 months.

The shoot: Shot with five Canon 7Ds with RAW resolution in 4 days and 1 night. Making the artists less visible (in order to let the cameras to see the animation coming to life on the wall in clear way) was one of the many technical challenges that had to be solved. Each single frame was shot with a five second exposure to make the artists movements quite blurry, but not invisible. The interval was the same as the exposure time plus the time an ultra-high speed memory card takes to save a RAW file. Obviously we did not want to lose the people who were watching the artists to paint – meaning the extras had to be as still as they could for very long periods of time. Such an extreme exposure time (and in full daylight) meant a huge stack of ND filters had to be added for each camera. That made the sunrises and sunsets challenging to capture with all the variables - riding the F-stop and adding or removing NDs at the same time.

The biggest challenge during the shoot was to predict how long each set-up will take – not only to calculate the camera moves but also to be able to hit the exact times with the light changing that had a connection to the animation.

The post-production: A project with over 95 000 still frames puts any software (some hardware too) to a test. Like mentioned earlier the goal was not to manipulate the animation later on – therefore the post process was kept as simple as possible. For the color grading we wanted to the maximum latitude (hence the heavy RAW files - no compression) to guarantee the spot the look and the colors it deserved – as the pay-off suggests “The Power Of Colors”.