2014 Winners & Shortlists

Brief Explanation

Ramadan is a month that used to bring families/people closer together. But with the rise of technology, people have actually gotten further apart. The spirit of Ramadan that brought everyone closer was lost; here our brand embraced a challenge… We wanted to make today's generation feel the true essence of Ramadan, in hope to unite them under one motive: BRINGING BACK TODAY THE RAMADAN SPIRIT OF YESTERDAY. We decided to use the same thing that took people apart to get them back together…. Technology! Using the latest CGI face replacement technique, we recreated legendary Ramadan entertainers to revisit Ramadan in 2013! We brought back the two original Boogie and TamTam puppets, Nelly the Queen of all Riddles, Fatoota, and the biggest surprise of all was Uncle Fouad the Godfather of all Arab comedians deceased 2006. To complement our film, we covered the country with imagery of these Ramadan stars. Our followers further engaged with the celebrities online (www.yallaramdanmasr.com), on-ground and through TV daily-riddles for a charitable cause of bringing joy to orphaned children. Our message reached everyone, everywhere. This marks our most successful Ramadan campaign.

Creative Execution

The challenge with our ad was to resurrect legendary actors known for their Ramadan specials in the 1980’s and early 1990’s. The problem was most of them didn’t age well and we wanted to bring them back as we remembered them. So we had to use a wide range of visual and special effects to bring them back to life. The ad featured the likes of Nelly who is now in her 60’s, but the biggest challenge was Fouad El Mohandes who died in 2006. Since Fouad El Mohandes wasn’t available to reprise his role. We had to build every layer of the actor’s face from his bone structure, skin tones, facial ticks and head movements using state-of-the art CGI. First we brought in a lookalike, who stood in as his body double and then brought in the Ghost team led by VFX supervisor Martin Gardeler and Eric Holm to do work on the face with their special effects team in Denmark. The first step was actually filming the ad with the old actors and the Fouad El Mohandes lookalike. All their scenes were shot twice, once with the actors and a second time using a lighting-capturing device in order for the post CGI to match the lighting of the actuall setting. After filming was done, bringing the legends to life was crafted in a period of a month and a half. In order to re-create a CGI Fouad El Mohandes a scripted module was used to create a realistic facial rig without blended shapes or wrap deformers. After re-creating the bone, flesh and skin, we used CGI programs like Maya Muscle, Muscle Splines, nCloth and Spline custom deformers in order to create a rough look of the actor. The next step was to animate his face, and this was done using rig run in Real Time with the second level of detail from ZBrush. All three levels of ZBrush were rigged in the animation. It took approximately four weeks of rigging production and finally facial replacement technology on the live action footage of the look alike double. Next was Nelly the Queen of All Riddles. We were lucky enough to have her reprise her breakthrough role, but to nail her 80’s look we had to make her look almost 30 years younger. The same methods of hyper realistic facial replacement technology was used, except we did not have to recreate the actual head but instead focus on the skin structure and the elimination of any wrinkles and so on. Everything from realistic lip movements to facial expressions had to be generated using nothing but CGI.