Going back to future - Tata water

Mount Everest Mineral Water, a Tata enterprise, recently launched the Himalayan brand in its new, international and aspirational avatar. Rediffusion DYR, the creative agency for Himalayan worked on a 60-second TVC with the VFX and post production done by Prime Focus India. The commercial is on air with the complete 60-seconder and shorter versions. The project was significant as it was the first ad created using Prime Focus‘ Indo-US pipeline with the tree sequence being executed at Frantic Films. A total of 19 professionals worked on the advertisement for one-and-a-half months. The advertisement uses VFX extensively to convey the creative theme of ‘going back to nature‘. The TVC was directed by Ravi Udyawar and produced by Kalpana Udyawar of Ravi Udyawar films.

Raj Tambaku, VFX Head, Prime Focus told AnimationXpress.com, "This is the first time that the complete VFX of a TVC - which uses special effects to such a large extent - has been done in India. Besides, the quality and feel of the VFX is of international standards. This was possible due to the trust placed in us by the agency and the Director Ravi Udyawar."

"The Himalayan is obtained from the origin of Ganges. The idea in the creative brief was to take everything back to the original form. In the TVC, the scarf goes to sheep, the shell to the snail and the shirt to the cotton-ball, so on and so forth. We had to make great efforts to get the aesthetics right. It helped that our US arm Frantic Films worked on the complex tree sequence. We had to revert them at certain times but overall the pipeline functioned smoothly," added Raj.

"The Prime Focus team working on the TVC prepared 10 drafts of each VFX sequence before we achieved the desired realistic look. Coming from a team that comprised mostly of freshers, this is an excellent job."

The Ad division of Prime Focus in Lower Parel has recently worked on the VFX and post production for TVCs on Toyota, Skoda and Tropicana Twister.


A blue screen chroma shot. Trees and Landscape addition is post VFX.


Chroma shot of backpack breaking up into straw. Since the backpack sequence could not be worked out, the entire bag was CG generated and then animated.


Blue screen chroma shot. The CG generated butterflies are carefully modelled so that the motion of wings is smooth and as real as possible. Besides, the texture has been carefully designed so that every individual butterfly looks exotic yet not too unreal.


Trees and Landscape addition post VFX and the entire CG of the tree sequence has been done by Frantic Films, US.



The already ripped t-shirt was animated to show the ripping process.