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 | Dec 3, 2019 |
TMP Worldwide – AABot Drop AR App Hello, how can I help? TMP Worldwide approached us with an exciting project that would result in a unique augmented reality app. They wanted us to develop their existing AA robot character, Bot, who was the face of the AA careers website, helping answer people’s questions via a chat window. He had a limited facial range and a few personality variations when TMP Worldwide first came to us. Our brief was split into three stages. First of all we were to take what existed, a 2D vector style head, and create a full 3D robot with a body and more facial expressions. The next stage was to then create 11 animations featuring Bot in various scenarios and environments. The final stage was to create an app that would allow the animations to be access via AR. The unique part of this app would be the ability to share videos and images from the app via social media and the plan was for this feature to be utilised for a competition the AA would run. Character design It was a lot of work, but work we were thrilled to take on. The first step was to take Bot who was a simple 2D vector head and transform him into a 3D character with a body. Vinyl toys were the reference we used for Bot’s body and informed the animation style to come. We started with a cute body that was based on a panda toy, a glass style monitor for the head that was curved on both the front and back. We worked...
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 30, 2017 |
Cute Augmented Reality pet required Sony London approached us to create many costumes for their augmented reality Playstation game for kids and families, Eyepet. This game allows the player to interact with a virtual pet in many games and activities and utilises augmented reality to make the pet appear to be in your own home. Walk-in wardrobe When it came to modelling the costumes, the main concern was creating a style that highlighted the cute nature of the character. This included exaggerated button sizes, big stitches etc. We referenced many animation studios and style to achieve our costumes look, such as Pixar, Disney and the Japanese super deformed style, known as Chibi (ちび) in Japanese. Japanese Art Director Masami Kochi worked with us on this project and her guidance in the Chibi style helped us create our cute costumes. The costumes we created covered many themes that kids would enjoy including cowboy, pirate, princess, robot and many more. Good boy! Sony were delighted with our costumes and we created over 30 outfits in the end. This project marked our first foray into augmented reality way back in 2009. Augmented reality has developed by leaps and bounds in the last decade and Bigman are very proud to have been involved in the early stages with Sony Eyepet, a game ahead of it’s time. Similar Projects Circle Health TMPW AAbot Augmented Reality NSS Faith Schools Highland Spring Sony Eyepet Augmented Reality mCommerce Talk to a Doctor Aqua Card IRIS Explainer Truchet Skillsoft Systagenix NCP Animated Customer Journey NCP Pixar Euro Pixels Vodafone Freebee Gadget Buddy Flex Pollock Pixar Render Farm LV=...
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...
