Cutting Edge’s The singing Australian wildflowers show they’re resilient as Priscilla

Priscilla Queen of the Desert turned Gloria Gaynor’s hit, I Will Survive, an Aussie anthem for gay pride in the 90s. Now Cutting Edge has turned it into an anthem for Aussie resilience.

The campaign by agency Redsuit for Cairns Regional Council’s aims to educate people about the ability of Australian plants to thrive without excessive water in gardens in the far north.

Floral diva, Ginger, leads a chorus back-up singers belting out a performance of the I Will Survive in the TVC that drives Cairns residents to a fact-finding website.

Director, Ian Anderson has matched the colour and flamboyance of Australia’s wildflowers with the vibrancy of the song’s 70s disco roots to design a chorus line of animated singing and dancing plant caricatures. Even the dappled sunlight that illuminates the garden adds to the disco mood…as does the trip down psychedelia lane.

Anderson also established an Alice In Wonderland inspired aesthetic for the hero plants and their environment, matching this storybook influenced style of animation with a more polished 3D edge.

Anderson achieved this by using traditional background painting techniques created in Maya and Photoshop. This painterly quality adds warmth and texture to the imagery, which is made up of a unique combination of traditional and contemporary animation approaches.

“We wanted to design and develop vibrant and lively plant characters that would really stand out on screen and by embodying a stylised 3D look and feel, we could bring the fable-like flora into a new, more modern era,” Anderson explained.

“Our 3D VFX pipeline meant we were able to embellish the animation of the plants with the addition of camera moves that bring us deeper into the garden world undergrowth,” he added.

Redsuit producer Tracey Fraser added, “We are proud of the campaign and appreciate all Cutting Edge has done to make this such an amazing little project. The client loves it and has really taken the characters to heart.”