When Smartcall briefed Mann Made Media to create a seven and a half minute training video to educate their market on the new smartload service, we proposed a unique solution: a full length HD 3D animation.

Smartload gives the South African public the opportunity to buy and sell airtime at a discounted rate, which is a breakthrough in airtime sales, but getting the market to understand exactly how to use the service is challenging. MMM proposed a piece of “edutainment”, with a very local “Mzansi” flavour, to engage potential customers using familiar situations and characters.

South African 3D animation studios tend to work with short-format productions (usually 30 seconds). Longer form animation work is frequently outsourced to studios in other countries, because of the intense amount of work (and therefore cost) that goes into 3D animation. Rather than pass up the challenge, however, Mann Made Media made use of some groundbreaking technology to make longer length 3D animation more achievable.

The Smartload project involved a huge amount of spoken dialogue, so the Mann Made Media team used facial motion capture with live actors in a studio environment. We shot the actors’ faces with four cameras and then brought the footage into a motion capture environment to track the lips and facial nuances. This method allowed us to rapidly generate realistic animation from live performances.

After just 4 months of work, the full-length animated video is almost complete – all that is left to do is light the scenes, render, and add some sound design and music. We are very excited to be launching this project, so watch this space for the final movie.