«Zambo» – Swiss Television Creates New Children's World

How can a small creative team quickly animate more than one hundred 3D characters?

This is the question that the «Zambo» team asked themselves. «Zambo» is the newest design project from the creative department at Swiss Television. «Zambo» is a children's multimedia world being broadcast since August, 2010 on SF (Swiss Television) and SR DRS (Swiss Broadcasting). Children in German-speaking Switzerland between the ages of 7 and 13 are taken on a multimedia discovery trip – on television, radio and online.

The interdisciplinary SF Design Team, with the help of external service providers, was responsible for creating the project's look; the On Air Design Team at SF laid the conceptional groundwork for «Zambo», created the comprehensive branding architecture and designed the entire television visuals, which includes dozens of openers and commercial bumpers, and a long list of game and graphics elements.

Senior designer Tiny Bernhard first designed the branding for «Zambo». He then brought the fantasy world to life. He used a beautifully hand-drawn Web design by Berlin-based gosub as a reference. A distinguishing feature on this site are the illustrated avatars that children can modify themselves using a cleverly-designed avatar generator. From the very beginning it was clear that the avatars would serve as characters in the project. The avatars were to take possession of the planet «Zambo» and run, jump, play and discover. But how was a single designer supposed to animate hundreds of these avatars in a very short time? Doing it manually was impossible, so the team turned to motion capturing. Initial tests with MoCap test data and CINEMA 4D's Motion system were very promising: movements could easily be cut, mixed and combined. The team then developed an optimized workflow and set up a motion capture session in Berlin. Tiny Bernhard used an optical infrared system on a stage area measuring 4 x 4 meters and 18 cameras. More than 500 motion sequences were created in only 3 days using 4 actors.

For the openers, Tiny Bernahrd brought the Web illustrations into the third dimension. 2D was turned into 3D: together with designers Alex Kersting and Benjamin Zurek, Tiny modeled and textured all marked objects, props, buildings, creatures and clouds in CINEMA 4D and set them up on the «Zambo» globe. "The openers are basically a 'tour de «Zambo»'. The avatars welcome the viewer and accompany him on his whirlwind expedition across all continents of this children's world. Due to time constraints, Global Illumination could not be used for rendering. However, excellent results were achieved by using CINEMA 4D's Ambient Occlusion feature and the HDRI light kit from greyscalegorilla (GSG). This combination also made flexible workflow and short render times possible."

Senior designer Jürg Dummermuth managed the final phase, which consisted of the creation of the commercial bumpers and two additional short openers. Outstanding audio was created by Adi Bühler from SR DRS. Adi composed music for all elements and also created a wide array of beautiful soundscapes.

«Zambo» can be seen on the channels SF 2, DRS 1 and at www.zambo.ch.

Swiss Television Team
Alex Hefter (Creative Director)
Patrick Arnecke (Head of Design), Thomas Gloor (Art Director)
Tiny Bernhard (Senior Lead Designer: Concept, Design, Director, Animation)
Adi Bühler (Audio Design)
Alex Kersting (Design)
Benjamin Zurek (Design, Animation)
Jürg Dummermuth (Concept, Animation)
Nicolo Bernasconi (Design & Animation VizRT)
Uli Krüger (Design & Animation VizRT)
Ladina Engler (Project Management)

Brave New World Studios Berlin, Torsten Strack (Motion Capture)
gosub communications, Berlin (Web Design & Illustrationen)