Situation: As the world’s most appealing sports and entertainment event, The Olympic Games are the world's only truly global, multi-sport, celebratory athletics competition. Beijing became the first city in the world to have hosted both the summer and winter Olympic Games.

Objectives: The objectives which to create a visual spectacle with a video that fused traditional Chinese culture with modern sports and convey the spirit of the Winter Olympics to the world, engaging more audiences to pay attention to Winter Olympics and traditional Chinese culture.

Brief: A shadow puppetry video featuring Nezha, a beloved Chinese mythological figure, promoted unity for the Winter Olympics by showcasing Chinese culture during the opening ceremony. It depicted Nezha pursuing the light and Olympic rings on the road to "Faster, Higher, Stronger, Together," conveying a message of collaboration among nations and leaving a lasting impression on athletes and spectators.

Three key elements of the video are the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics, the intangible cultural heritage of shadow play, and the image of Nezha. We decided to use "Nezha" as the main character, who is an ancient Chinese mythological figure. In the video, Nezha chases the Olympic rings by taking different winter sports, showing the audience characteristic movements of major sports of Beijing 2022, including Ice Hockey, Curling, Bobsleigh, Luge, Biathlon, and Figure Skating. Traditional shadow play art form was restored with modern animation production methods.shadow play emphasizes on rhythmic and dynamic expression. Combined with sports and Winter Olympics culture, it makes winter sports more appealing with exquisite figures and humorous performances. By incorporating well-known Hebei local myths and stories, it also helps to create a lively atmosphere for people who watch the Winter Olympics.

The strategy was to promote the Olympic Winter Games Beijing 2022 and showcase Chinese culture to a global audience. Audience insights revealed that there was a higher desire to watch Olympic Games coverage among youth. To reach more audiences and differentiate from similar projects, a video called "Ice & Snow Dreams Towards the Future" was produced, combining folk culture and sports.

The community building and management approach involved creating a video that conveys the spirit of the Winter Olympics and displays traditional culture to reach more young adults. The video features Nezha, a protection deity in Chinese mythology, as the main character in over 20 different films, using shadow puppetry to show Nezha chasing towards the Olympic rings on the road of "Faster, Higher, Stronger, Together." This strategy aimed to reach a wider audience and promote the Winter Olympics through a creative and unique approach that highlighted traditional Chinese culture.

Filming and Production Scale:

The two-dimensional animated short film "Shadow Play Meets Winter Olympics" is aligned with the grand event of Beijing 2022, using red, white, and blue as its key visual colors. At the beginning of the creation process, a professional team adopted a linear narrative structure and selected a dozen shadow play characters to showcase this intangible cultural heritage art form. Finally, the team decided to feature "Nezha," an ancient Chinese mythological figure, as the main character and used the colors red, white (representing ice and snow), and blue (representing the competition environment) to highlight the animation's theme of "Ice & Snow Dreams Towards the Future."

Nezha connects different major events of Beijing 2022 in the animation, striving for "Faster, Higher, Stronger, Together" on the winter sports road and highlighting the unique cultural charm of "shadow play art." The creativity, screenwriting, character design, and scene design in the video are all original.

Brand Relevance:

The video highlights the brand's positioning of technology and culture, using technology in the cultural field to place intangible cultural heritage at the forefront of digitalization.

Contact Point:

Emotional resonance, folk culture.

Materials, Stylistic Elements, Design Choices:

Shadow puppetry, traditional Chinese folk culture.

Timeline:

Producing requirements and ideas by the end of January

Drawing filming script and preparing filming in mid-January

Completing overall vision during Chinese New Year in February

Completing and Submitting video on February 22

Reach:

This video reached 330 million people on social media platforms worldwide.

Engagement:

The video's engagement rate is around 5%.

Impact:

The video was released on multiple official media platforms, such as CCTV.com, CCTV Sports APP, CCTV Children's Channel, and Xuexi.cn, and was viewed over 32.2 million times.

Brand perception:

After the video was released, most of the feedback from the audience was positive, and it helped to improve the brand's search rate.

Achievement against objectives:

We created a visual spectacle with a video that fused traditional Chinese culture with modern sports and conveyed the spirit of the Winter Olympics to the world, engaging more audiences to pay attention to the Winter Olympics and traditional Chinese culture.