watch movie

Top London ad agency Fallon commissioned RCA graduate Nikita Diakur to make a promo for the BBC World Service inspired by the Zimbabwean author Petina Gappah.

Dark humour and playful visuals go hand in hand with Petina Gappah’s stories. “We laugh at each other, we make jokes about very dark subjects, I believe this is the essence of the Zimbabwean character.” In the audio she is amused when asked whether she has “permission to take pictures” by a member of the general public.

Nikita wanted to create a thought provoking film that represented the situation in Zimbabwe by bringing together iconic, chaotic, playful and atmospheric imagery.

Nikita’s animatic right at the beginning incorporated a dizzying camera move created in Maya, flying through a world of objects. When Munky was asked by Partick Craig from Blink Ink to get involved, it became obvious that we needed to continue to work with Nikita’s Maya setup and complement it with the 2D / 3D functionality of The Foundry’s Nuke compositing system.

Patrick and Nikita rushed off to Africa for four days and captured as much texture from the city and the bush as they could using a Canon 5D. Overnight they uploaded footage and stills for us to start cutting out and assembling.

Fantastic Mr Fox supervising compositor Rupert Davies took on the challenge of Nuke for the first time with 2D/3D VFX artist Rachel Wright and Nikita both doing fantastic work in Maya. World renowned leading expert and tutor on Nuke/Maya Matt Leonard came in to oversee our system and provide useful insight for us to get the best out of what is still a fledgling workflow. Gary Brown assembled the final renders in Flame, graded and onlined the final masters.

Zena Loxton produced for Fallon with Joe De Souza and Samuel Walker leading creative.

See a ‘making of’ film on the BBC site here.

---

TAGS: bbc, blink, fallon, nikita diakur, patrick craig, zena loxton

• November 12th, 2009
• special projects