shots Awards 2016: Best Use of Animation

Following on from our coverage of the shots Awards 2016, shots caught up with againstallodds’ Niklas Rissler to find out how the Gold winners of the Best Use of Animation in a Commercial category approached the job. 

shots Awards 2016: Best Use of Animation in a Commercial

Gold winner: The Spanish Lottery Justino

When Leo Burnett gave you the script, did you immediately envision how you would approach it?

Yes and no. It was a great script they gave us and it immediately put images into our head, so the emotional core of the narrative came pretty quickly. It was however written very long so we had to sit down and rework the script to make it fit the time we had to tell the story.

How much freedom was there in terms of the direction and how you interpreted the idea?

We felt that we had a lot of freedom to take the film where we wanted it to go. It was of course made a lot easier by the fact that we were very much in sync with the creatives right from the get go. It was a great working relationship and one of those rare projects where we and the agency were constantly pushing in the same direction.

Why did you decide to use the style of animation you did for the spot?

Several reasons really, it was part of the brief and also a style we're comfortable working in. Most importantly though it fit the story very well. So much of the story telling relies on subtle expressions and we needed a style that would allow for that.

One of the Awards judges referred to it as “very heartfelt”. How important is the balance between what you can do with animation and telling the story well?

The story always come first. If the story doesn't work you have no film regardless of the medium. For us animation is just a tool for storytelling and we like it because it gives us the freedom to approach any story. There are of course thing you can do in animation that you can't with other media but it should only be used if it adds to the narrative or the emotion you need to carry the story.

What was the most difficult part of making Justino?

It's a hard question to answer as it didn't feel difficult at all. It was of course a lot of hard work from a lot of people but the character of Justino and the story was so clear in our minds that it was just a matter of powering on until we got there. We had a great crew on the job, most of them people we've worked with for years.

I think everyone on the project felt that we had a potential gem on our hands and really wanted to make it shine, so everyone rolled up their sleeves and put their backs into it..

The most difficult thing on the project was probably to match our ambition the the restraints of time and budget.

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