MIHIR LELE
SORRENTINA ANIMATED BRAND FILMS
Mascot Design | Animation
Client
Sorrentina Honestly Italian
Agency
Bare Bones Collective
Production House
Blip Studios
Writers and Directors
Girish Narayandass
Anuya Jakatdar
Mascot Design (Chef Pinocchio)
Mihir Lele
DoP
Prateek Khullar
Producer
Jason Ryan Dias
Music and Voiceover
Tejas Menon
Editor
Nitesh Vaje
Animation and Animation Directors
Mihir Lele
Hrishikesh Deshpande
Compositing
Mihir Lele
Compositing Support
Doozyworks Studios
Grade
Chevlyn Fernandes
Management Team (Bare Bones)
Natasha Neroy
Swati Dua
Art Direction (Bare Bones)
Arpita Sawant
About the Brand
Sorrentina is a brand that drew inspiration from the Naples region of Italy, named after the Sorrento coast.
Sorrentina was born out of an abiding love for Italian cooking and culture. They are unabashed admirers of the history, culture, and civilizational ideals of Italy and their passionate people. The joyful Italian approach to all aspects of life, but especially towards food, is their biggest inspiration.
The Mascot - Chef Pinocchio
Sorrentina as a brand claims to be honestly Italian as they believe in delivering authentic and thoughtfully crafted, deeply satisfying Italian food everyday.
Who else can convey this better than Pinocchio who is a fictional character and happens to be from Italy known for his tendency to lie, which leads to his nose growing longer each time he tells a falsehood.
Pinocchio being Italian works out as the face of the brand campaign and helps in storytelling across platforms in different formats thus tapping into the beliefs of people to make the brand offerings more relatable and believable.
The writer's came up with this idea for the 3 film brand campaign, and once the client was on-board the above concept, we were presented with the following brief to design the mascot for the campaign-
Chef Pinocchio - Design Brief
To create a unique version of Pinocchio, known as “Chef Pinocchio”- one that would visually bear no similarity to the original Disney character. The only thing common between the Disney Pinocchio and Chef Pinocchio would be that both their noses grow longer whenever they lie, and that they are both made of wood.
Chef Pinocchio has moved to India from Sorrento, Campania in Italy, to teach Indians all about food that’s honestly Italian. He's a purist when it comes to Italian food and products. And he truly believes that Sorrentina is Honestly Italian.
He’s suave, confident and playful. He’s always joking around, unless it’s about Italian cuisine. Because there’s nothing funny about it. He’s made his peace with his lie-detecting nose. He even uses it for fun. "Charming" is a keyword that best describes his personality.
He is stylish, well-built but not too tall, and carries a ponytail, which he keeps tied. He looks like a chef with his chef’s hat and chef’s outfit, with a farfalle bowtie and an eternal macaroni-shaped smile. He walks with confidence like Johnny Bravo.
He has a tall chef’s toque, indicating his “tall” stature in the Chef world.
With this detailed brief in mind, we set out to create various designs for the character.
Route 01
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Route 02
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Route 03 and Overview
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Extra Route
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Shortlisted Route + Some more explorations
A route from the above explorations was shortlisted and taken up to further include some points of feedback. Along with this, some initial explorations that the internal team at Bare Bones had tried out were taken up and explored further to see if there's anything that could work from amongst those ideas.
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Finalised Mascot Design
The design incorporates all of the Chef Pinocchio's characteristics mentioned in the brief above. Since the character is designed to be animated as a 2d animation, the lines on his face and hands would be painstakingly drawn for every shot of the films, to give the wooden texture feel to his body.
(Below) Chef Pinocchio with his regular nose, followed by a turnaround with his elongated nose.
Animated Films
Once the character design of Chef Pinocchio was locked and approved, the next step was to plan his actions to best bring out his personality in under 30 seconds across 3 films. Each action in every shot he was in had to be meticulously designed to best bring out his personality.
On Set Supervision- Stand-ins
The 2D animated character would be seen in a live action, real environment interacting with real world elements. And so, the animation team supervised the shoot for all 3 brand films, to make sure that each shot with Chef Pinocchio in it, is composed keeping the character's placement in mind.
To achieve this, we took a reference shot with a 5 ft stand-in (approximate height of Chef Pinocchio without the chef's hat) so the animator's knew the exact position and scope of action for Chef Pinocchio, for each shot.
On Set Supervision- Track Shots
For the shots where the camera is tracking in or out, and there's an interaction between real life elements and the animated character, we used a tracking element in frame, so the character's position in the shot wrt the real life elements is accounted for.
For instance, in the example below from the pasta film, the shot starts with the character's mid-close up and ends with the character standing behind a family enjoying the food laid out on the dining table. For this shot, a stand-in plate (like the one seen in the below image) or a tracking marker, was used that could help the compositor track the character's position and size in the moving shot .
Process
Process- Character Expressions
Reference Videos for Character Expressions
The director helped us with reference videos for the kind of expressions that were required in some specific shots to best bring out the emotion of the dialogue.
Final Films
Film 01 - Pasta Collection
Film 02 - Truffle Chips
Film 03 - Cookies and Biscuits