by tompainter | Sep 13, 2022 |
Circle Health 3D ‘MTV’ Dance Animation for the TikTok Era Bring the energy! The lovely folks over at TMP worldwide came to us with an amazing brief, to create a bold and exciting promo video to help recruit experienced theatre staff into Circle Health’s hospitals. To get a rep Specifically, Circle wanted the campaign to stand out in a very ambitious way from the standard healthcare fare, which lacked the pizazz they were looking for. They wanted to build a reputation for high standards and a dynamic, modern culture. “Don’t try and make me cry. I’m sick of that John Lewis Christmas film tone that seems to have infected every film in this industry. I want this to be cool.” David Cooper Chief People Officer Circle Health Group The Strategy Bring the fun! The idea was to use movement, colour and character design to embody Circle’s brand values into a dance animation that would to energise and inspire potential recruits. Get your freak on! Al Wotton, head of creative at TMPW, had the genius idea of styling these videos like the classic 90’s MTV hiphop videos by Hype Williams – that was all he had to say, we were ON IT! The cinematographers party We knew to do this successfully, the elements we would need would be… > Some nice character design > Dance choreography with the energy of a TikTok / MTV dance video. > Great costumes > Cool lighting > Funky camera moves/angles and the obligatory VX1000 Mk1 fish eye lens of the era To integrate all of these elements together in a holistic manner, we’d...
by tompainter | Jul 2, 2018 |
BBC Doodlebugs The Beeb We were approached with the fantastic opportunity to work on a character animation project for the BBC. The brief was to create short animated clips of three bug characters. The work we produced would be used in the BBC’s comedy sketch show Doodlebugs, a combination of live action clips with animated elements to bring inanimate objects to life. Triple Act We were given the sketches and concept design of the three characters we were to animate. We then created the 3D models based on those original concepts. The result was cute and engaging main characters that the audience could enjoy and that created continuity throughout the show. The bugs would interact with each other in order to help bring the next skit onscreen. Characterisation Character animation is among the hardest to achieve. Each of the characters had a distinct personality, we had the short lazy bug, the tall enthusiastic bug and the flying clever bug. We had a very short time frame for this production so we scaled up our team our team of animators and ended up working with 15 animators. The challenge was to define each character and keep that characterisation consistent across the the large team of animators we were working with. Comedy Greats Not only did we have to inject the characters with their own personality, we need to do it in a comedic way. We looked to classic comedy such as silent stars Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton for inspiration. We referenced their comedy stylings such as exaggerated facial expressions and body gestures to help our little bugs tell their...
by tompainter | May 26, 2017 |
Spaniel Puppy – Virtual Pet Cute CG pet required After we won the contract to recreate the Duracell Bunny in CGI we quickly realised that we needed to take our fur rendering technology to the next level. The problem was that we would need to turn around the animation in a matter of weeks, but we wouldn’t get the bunny design assets for a month after the project started. Want to see some puppies? In order to minimise our risk for our client, we decided the best solution was to create a cute spaniel puppy whilst we waited for the bunny, this way we could test our fur pipeline from start to finish and have it all ready to fire on all cylinders once the Duracell assets were ready. Bigman – bespoke puppy grooming salon! Matching the type of curly hair that a real spaniel has was very challenging, as all the different bits of the pup have different colours and different types of clumping or curliness. We had to create a new ‘groom’ department to handle the work and upgrade to new fur software that could hand realistic simulation of the fur’s gravity and inertia. Data overload! Another problem we faced was rendering thousands of frames of animation, each with thousands of hairs and millions of rays of light bouncing around them. We will spare you the geeky details but to summarise we had to perform some clever technical tricks in the rendering pipeline in order to optimise the amount of data we had to deal with. A well disciplined pup Everyone was thrilled with the adorable cute...
by tompainter | May 6, 2016 |
The World in Your Hands Stop motion style animation Corporate communications For this project, the brief outlined the need for a short video that combined live action footage and CGI, to promote international banking services. He’s got the whole world To help get across the script in a visual and engaging way the video would star Steve, holding the Earth in his hands, to show just how small the world can feel thanks to modern banking. A mix of old and new We wanted to develop our CGI in a visually engaging style but there were a number of things to consider, we needed to ensure that the important message wasn’t lost in the visuals and that the style worked well. It was agreed that there should be a handmade charm to the campaign with a stop motion style, but our schedule was extremely tight. To combat this we used a combination of traditional techniques and modern CGI to achieve our desired look, this gave us the flexibility to incorporate the best of both techniques in a short space of time. Hand painted props To give our computer generated earth a quirky handmade look, we carefully studied how hand painted wooden props look. Inspired by this we incorporated these ideas in our design, striking a nice balance between clean, simple design and a quirky artisan look. Talk to the gaffer On set we used a real basketball painted blue as a placeholder for our CGI world, which meant all we would need to do in post production is swap the ball for our digital earth. Catching polygons! The last shot...
by tompainter | May 5, 2016 |
mCommerce Financial services explainer video CGI advertisement We were approached to help promote a new B2B business mobile app. As well as live action, our client wanted CGI to help explain the concept of the app. An engaging concept The film would show a typical banking customer in their home using the app, demonstrating its features and benefits in a real life situation. We would then need to combine footage of the phone with a high-end 3D animation of a fashion boutique coming out of the screen. We refined these ideas by developing the script into a highly detailed storyboard. Pre-visualisation The complex relationship between the live-action footage and the CGI elements meant that it was critical we locked down all the camera angles and movements before production began and so we created a pre-visualisation to help us with this. Pre-vis allowed us to tweak any aspects of the cinematography, such as lighting design and equipment choices, before any work began and gave us a great feel for how the final video would look. When it came to shooting the video we were able to use the pre-vis as a strict guide, which made the shoot day run very smoothly. Dummy modelmaking A large portion of the project would be done digitally in post production, and it was important to consider this on the day of the shoot. To help us visualise where our CGI elements would be, we created a cardboard version of the shop to act as a placeholder. This really helped us to perfectly frame and set the focus of the shots as if our digital...
