ZooZoo

File:Zoozoo.jpg

A wallpaper featuring Zoozoos

During the Indian Premier League (IPL), Vodafone commercialised Zoozoos, white, ghost-like creatures with ballooned bodies and egg heads through their advertisements. These ads though look animated are in real humans in the Zoozoo costumes. Ogilvy & Mather, the agency that handles Vodafone advertisements, wanted to make real people look as animated as possible and hence employed Bangalore-based Nirvana Films to shoot these ads in Cape Town, South Africa, just in time for IPL.

O&M were asked to create around 29 advertisements for the entire IPL season, with one new advertisement to be aired each day. As at 17 May 2009, there have been close to 27 new advertisements that have aired.

The name was chosen by Rajiv Rao, executive creative director, South Asia, Ogilvy India who explained that he chose the name to favour something that was "fun, memorable and catchy, and not a clever one that’s difficult to pronounce". Shot by Prakash Varma and produced by Nirvana Films.

Making the Zoozoo

The Zoozoo's are in fact real people in costumes with rubber cut-out's for facial expressions, however the sets and production of the advertisements give the effect of the characters being animated. The effect was achieved by a variety of methods including choosing the right material for the body suits to ensure that there were no wrinkles when the characters moved, shooting the footage at lower framerates and keeping backgrounds simple in terms of details and the use of a neutral tone of grey.

The zoozoo's were split in two parts - the body and the head. The body was made using a special material stuffed with foam in some places (notably around the stomach) while the head was created using using a harder material called Perspex.

The characters, all local theatre actors, had to perform in costumes, which came with their own set of problems. Wearing an enlarged headpiece, for example, meant that all the actors were practically blind. “They couldn’t see where they were going, so we had several funny instances where the actors would walk right out of the frame during shooting. Also, it was very difficult for them to breathe with those headpieces on, so the actors would take them off every few minutes for some air. But after the first few days, we got into the groove of things and managed just fine,” says Prakash Varma, director at Nirvana Films.

Still, on TV, the Zoozoos have come as a breath of fresh air providing a much-needed respite from the staple diet of cricket and politics that most viewers are living on—one of the objectives of the agency and the film-maker. “We wanted to create something unique. A character that would always be memorable… somewhat alien and yet, very human,” says Varma, who made the films. “When we started out, the idea was to ensure that no one should be watching cricket. Everyone should be talking about Zoozoo.”

The Zoozoo's have gained immense popularity since they first aired, and have their own microsite ([1]) as well as a fan page on Facebook.