Unbox Yourself

Integrated brand launch for Zihua, including a fully 3D printed stop motion animation

The world’s first’ - you hear that quite a lot in adverting case studies. Well, back in 2014 we directed what was the world’s first fully 3D printed commercial for Zihua Creative (zihua.com.cn).

Zihua was an online learning platform focused on the creative industries, think of it as China’s answer to Skillshare. They provided courses for illustration, filmmaking, animation and 3D printing and we thought why not put all these skills to use and create a commercial that, after completing the courses, you would be able to replicate yourself.

Case Study

So we created the story of the little boxman character that tries to unbox himself, a metaphor for creatives that sometimes seem to be confined by a box themselves. Then we created a full CG animation and printed every single frame of the little guy with 3D printers. Once printed we put them on a little stage and photographed the guy again, painstakingly, frame by frame just as you do it in a stop motion film. Completely nuts, but a whole lot of fun.

And to not waste any of the plastic, we sent out the 3D prints in collectors’ items boxes to attract bloggers and influential creatives to join the platform. It’s the most meta project we have done to date.