The spot begins with our hero smoking a cigarette on a park bench reflecting about her relationship with smoking.

We see fast cuts of flashback scenes,  with intense presence of the colors blue and green, representing her fantasy and memories of her youth as a smoker. The colors change to a yellowish hue, hinting on sickness with scenes like shortage of breath and coughing, there is a big presence of smoke hunting the main character like a ghost.

Cut back to the park bench,  where we can see her subtle reaction as she decides is time to quit smoking. She trows that pack in the trash start walking away from that life.

Cut to different situations representing the struggle of getting rid of cigarettes, until we finally see her refusing a cigarette in an analog scene from the beginning where she welcomes the smoke from  the same secondary character.

The turning point of the spot is represented by the smoke that moves like a character trying to suffocate the main character. As she breaks free from this smoke wipe effect there is a huge shift of mood, sound  and to more saturated colors, representing the freedom from the nicotine vice. 

Next we  follow her through colorful and happy moments. With a camera spin effect we see the passage of time as she enters the scene young with her toddler and ends the shot older with her daughter graduating.

Cut to a sequence highlighting the product ( CT Screen machine ),  detail shots of how it is different from a classic MRI machine. 

The next couple of shots is about her getting old and living a healthy and cancer free life, with bright and warmer colors.  

In the final shot we see an older version of our hero in the same park bench from the beginning, but this time she is using her healthy lungs to blow some bubbles with her grand daughter. 

EARLY CONCEPTS

Hair and Wardrobe

Our starting point fork the look dev was a nice painted texture simulating a baked light directly in 3D

We then set the light and rendered some frames to digitally hand paint over them. First test was on 10's (  one every ten frames ) , second test as on 2's ( every other frame ). The tests gave us some very close results  but with gigantic different amounts of work.

We then used a full scene to start training the copycat tool in Nuke. We fed the bot with the raw render and the sequence with the  hand painted frames on 10's. The neural network analyzed the difference between them and applied the effect in the in-between frames.

RAW RENDER

The first results was too flickery for what we wanted, so we adjusted the brushstroke and the amount of intervention of the brushwork in the scene. Each test took us between 15 to 30 hours of image analyzing. 

Because of such a strong role on  the narrative we wanted to treat the smoke effect as an important character in our story so  the design and the colors of the effect are very present.  There is a rhythm that smoke follows through out the spot where it  slowly grows into this  ghostly figure that haunts our hero. It  is always there , always trying to touch her, be near her, until it finally makes its move to swallow the protagonist but she struggles and breaks free from it 

Early style studies

Animation studies

We've tried real paint, and even a 3D brushstroke for the smoke effect, but in the end we decided to go with  a digital frame by frame 2D animation

final look

Directors: Altons ( Felipe Machado e Tiago Marcondes) e Mateus de Paula Santos;
Executive Producer: Luis Ribeiro;
Producer: Su Constantine;
Head of Production: Clara Morelli;
Head of Post Production: Marcelo Barbosa;
Head of CG: Fabio Shigemura;
Team Coordination: Rosangela Gomes Gonçalves e Bruna Boretto;
Post-Production Supervision: Leandro Pena;
Post-Production Producer: André Carvalho
Storyboard artist: Érica Yumi Nagai;
Concept: omulo de Oliveira, Gabriel dos Anjos das Graças, Wilson Panassi, Samara Saráty,  Yara Rocha, Alexey, Fabio Miraglia, Guilherme Lascasas e Giovani Kososki ;
Color Key: Pedro Minho;
Animatic Editor: Érica Yumi Nagai
CG Coordination: Cristiane Nascimento Santos;
CG Supervisor: Marcos Samia
Modeling Lead: Tiago Mesquita;
Modeling: Guto Sposito, Marcos Smirkoff, Maurício Machado, Natan Zuanaci , Natan Ernani e Fernando Azulini;
LookDev: Ricardo Riamonde e Renan Takeshita;
Rigging Lead: Rafael Dias (Joy) ;
Rigging : Rafael Shiva, Murilo Barbelli, Felipe Gimenes e James do Carmo Correa;
Animation Lead: Michael Maron;
Animation: Larissa Paz, Camila S., Ronaldo Brito, André Lorenzini, Leo Zitto Jr, Karina Chung, Nicolás Taró, Fabio Pugliese, Felipe Simões e Mendel Reis;
2D VFX: Genoviz Animação , Luiz Fernando Rangel, Robson Vilalba e Gabriel Bitar;
Lighting & Render: Thiago Peretto;
Color Grading: Leticia Blanco;
Composition: Leandro Pena
Rotoscoping: Gassan Abdouni;