The challenge
Tooq Perfumes, a returning client, briefed a launch animation for a new fragrance: a tiger emerges from a snowy forest, enters a portal that carries it through time, walks through a modern museum where Tooq's perfumes are on display, and finally sits down next to the new bottle on its marble stand. The brief also asked for a white-background catalog image of the blue bottle with its shiny black label.
Two things had to be settled first. Black tigers don't exist, so Martin explained the difference and proposed a black panther-type cat instead. And when Tooq asked to add a man running next to the animal through all the seasons, Martin said no: in 3D it would look fake, and animating the cat was already a big task. With Christmas close, the schedule was tight.
The process
We started from a purchased cat model, which the team turned black, and trees from an earlier deer animation gave the forest a head start. Five days in, the panther was ready, the forest was under way and the gallery came next.
Tooq's first review was blunt: the jump into the portal "does not look real at all". Martin found a better reference clip of a big cat jumping, tail up, tail down, legs pulled back, and the jump was rebuilt to match it. The gallery notes became a clear list: turn the camera around the bottle and the cat in the last scene, add blue bottles everywhere, focus on one picture on the wall, put snowy trees behind the windows and gray the walls for more mystery. The bottle's logo was corrected to high-gloss embossed black. When Tooq asked for the panther to bare its fangs at the end, we tried it, but the jaw didn't look real, so Tooq kept the calmer shot of the panther looking at the perfume.
The outcome
Tooq approved the gallery on 10 January ("We love it, now it's perfect"), and the final render ran for about two days; the last scene alone was 331 frames at around two minutes each. The finished animation, with music and an animated logo at the end, was delivered on 17 January 2024 in 16:9, 9:16 and 1:1, together with high-resolution stills that Martin had included free of charge.
Tooq then asked for a few changes to the catalog image: the bottle 1 cm taller, the shadow on the right, the cap tightly closed and a pure white background. They approved it on 25 January with "That's perfect."
