Cartoon characters mean serious business for brands

Brands are constantly looking for new ways to reach their audiences and to tell their stories.

It is no longer enough for a brand to run an ad that only sells the product: audiences are demanding that the stories in these ads be exciting, memorable, useful and relatable.

Brands are upping their ad games to deliver what their audiences are demanding.

Animating characters in 3D is one of the ways to meet these demands.

The question this raises however, is how efficient the use of animations in terms of brand representation is.

You must have seen the Jamii Telecoms ads on primetime TV? Faiba? Yes, Faiba Internet and TV.

It started with “faimba” in 2012 and this cartoon character called Jalice (it’s really, Charles).

Jalice spoke in a heavy eastern-Kenya accent and wore this loose-hanging tiger-print garment that was cinched around his waist.

I asked an ardent TV lover about this Faiba character and what struck her about the ad: “I don’t remember much about the product but I remember that cartoon,” she says, smiling.

“He had these long legs and feet, and no shoes. And he didn’t know how to use a computer!” She chuckles.

"I also remember Wafula and Koimett, they were cartoons. Were they also selling Faiba? I’m not sure. Mbugua sells Faiba, that one I know.”

Jalice, Wafula, Koimett and Mbugua are some of the animated and cartoon characters that have hit the ad spaces in our TV screens.

And we – as audiences and consumers – have grown to fall in love with them over and over.

They precede the products they are selling.

Why is it so?

“The reason why we remember these characters is because they emulate the lifestyles and characteristics of our own Kenyan and African culture,” says Michael Muthiga.

Mr Muthiga is 31, he’s the founder of the company that produced and animated these characters, Fatboy Animations Limited.

He’s also the creative director in the team of seven.

His co-director— Sendeu Kanyare, 28 , is a producer of their 2D content.

The company started in October 2010.

“We had never seen animations do what we do as people,” says Mr Muthiga.

These characters are us, he says, how they walk, speak, dress and their quirks are all unarguably African.

“Once you make a character that looks like your own people, that character becomes a hit.”

2D and 3D character animation

Joseph Sande, co-founder of RollinMedia adds, “Animation is becoming a popular option for brands because these characters have a lasting impression.”

RollinMedia produces 2D and 3D character animation and visualisation, was cofounded in 2013 by Mr Sande and Miriam Ogara. Mr Sande is 24.

“These characters grab the attention of the audience and are able to communicate the brand’s spirit. Most importantly, they deliver content in a format that surpasses perception and reality.”

But despite the effectiveness of the 3D animated characters for their ads, brands are staying away from them because it is a costly campaign to run. Mr Sande continues, “Animated ads are costlier to produce than traditional ads because it requires a higher level of creativity and skill, they require more specialised development knowledge and take a longer time to produce.”

In Africa, Mr Muthiga says that it’s only Kenya, South Africa and Nigeria that do these 3D animated characters.

“We get jobs from South Africa because our animation quality is better than theirs,” says Mr Muthiga. Both Mr Sande and Mr Muthiga are self-taught animators.

The creative process of these animated ads starts in the mind: the animated character is thought up.

A designer sketches him using lines to create character in 2D.

A script is written and a storyboard developed – this is what the story looks like in visuals and copy.

The storyboard looks like a comic strip and includes dialogue from the script.

Then comes casting for voice. Voicing characters is one of the anchors of the character – audiences will mostly remember how a character said something.

All these stages of the creative process have to be approved by the client,” says Mr Muthiga.

“It can take anywhere between two weeks to a month, depending on how quickly the client returns his feedback.”

It is from this point onwards that the technology and the expertise of working with the software comes in.

“We recreate the character and model it, like the way you would with clay,” says Mr Muthiga.

“Rigging gives the character a skeleton structure. Then we add to the rig the bones, muscles, skin, flesh... It has to move like a human being.”

They also use the software to simulate the environment the character will operate in.

“This process can take up to a week. Rendering the ad takes another five days.

Edit is the final stage. Editing the ad down to 30 seconds takes an hour.”

Each of these stages has a direct and indirect cost attached to it.

There are direct costs such as time and electricity.

These direct costs will ultimately be passed to the client, others will be absorbed by the company.

Then there are the indirect costs; these come from the tools themselves. The technology— the hardware and software — to create these 30-second ads doesn’t come cheap.

Hardware itself, for one computer costs about Sh1 million.

“Each computer needs four graphics cards,” says Mr Muthiga.

“Each graphic card costs Sh90,000. It needs two processors; each processor is Sh300,000, the memory, RAM, is about Sh 60,000.”

That’s just a portion of the hardware costs.

The designers need a host of registered and licensed software to produce and animate these characters to the standard of quality they are after.

Clients are paying for this quality, “We buy the licences so that we can get support from the programmer whenever there’s a problem,” says Mr Muthiga.

"You can’t work with cracked software because it’s likely to crash during production. Software licences –for each computer – comes to about Sh450,000 annually.

Software we use includes Maya Zbrush, Adobe, RealFlow, Ace Matte Box and others. The software we use to render is called Redshift.”

“On Redshift,” he continues, “it takes five days to render an animated 3D ad that will run for 30 seconds. It costs Sh80,000 per second to render.

Compare that to a 2D animation which takes Sh5,000 per second to render, and needs two hours.”

The costs are not only heavy to the brand/client.

They are also a barrier-to-entry for design companies that desire to produce and animate characters.

There aren’t many local companies that are in this business.

Mr Sande says that most of their work has been in architectural visualization, not character animation: “Our current 3D client is Plus onemedia from Uganda.

We’ve had one other in the past.” Mr Muthiga adds, “Our 2D clients sustain the business. Our 3D clients are fewer – they include Safaricom, Davis and Shertlif, Barclays, Ribena and others.”

Mr Muthiga says the company will eventually move away from producing animated ads to producing content for mass consumption.