What can we say about Hasbro? Not only do they have fantastic brands and projects to work on, they are some of the best people we have ever worked with. Everyone there is passionate about what they do, and you just can’t help being inspired and excited to work on projects for Transformers, Star Wars, Nerf and many more.

This case in particular is for the re-launch of the Nerf N-Strike series. In addition to the great work we’ve done with Hasbro over the years, what really drew them to us on this series of projects was our full service capability. Casting needed to be done, new creative look and feel needed to be worked out, photography needed to be shot, and retouching and compositing needed to be done. With no actual product in hand, we needed to solve the problem of producing a great package without it. In comes CGI! Hasbro was able to get all these things done in one place…Indigo Studios.

The project started with the conversion of engineering data supplied by Hasbro. We used this data to build the blasters on the computer and take care of the problem of not having physical prototypes to work with.

CAD original shots

At the same time our producers were busy setting up a casting to find the perfect faces for the boxes.
Test shoots were taking place, and we began working out the “look and feel” for the photography.

Casting shots

After talent was selected and creative was approved, we did the photo shoot. Hasbro came down to the studio, and we shot 2 different setups. One setup for the box covers and another for inset and action shots. We captured a range of poses and expressions of multiple models over the 2 day shoot. Hasbro left with shots in hand. While they were selecting shots for the packages, we were finishing off the CGI blasters. Once complete we rendered out the CG blasters to fit into the chosen shots and finished with composting/sweetening and effects.

Final art on 3 of the boxes in the lineup

The project was an incredible success, and Nerf continues to be one of Hasbro’s best selling brands. The work we did on these boxes led to many variations and different line looks like the clear series, Sonic series, and WhiteOut. We also just completed all of the packaging for Super Soaker and the new Vortex line coming out in the fall.

One of the key highlights of these projects is Hasbro’s use of CGI. They now have a library of blasters for all of these lines that can be used in the future. We’ve used them for new lines, animations, and for testing new decos. Build them once and use them forever!

To all our friends at Hasbro…thank you for allowing us to be a part your continued success!