Mazda
Illustrative CGI advertisement
Creative collaboration
At Bigman we pride ourselves on our imaginative and unique animation styles and our stylised, experimental Mazda animation, made in collaboration with celebrated illustrator Natalie Cowx, showcases this perfectly.
Quirky animation style
We wanted to create a promotional video where a photorealistic car was the center piece in an enchanting cartoon dreamland. The fusing of crisp CGI and Cowx’s whimsical illustration style needed to look natural, as though they belonged together, and so we ensured that the colour and charm of the illustrations was reflected in the car as it moved.
Bespoke 3D rendering
It was important that we retained the graphic look and charm of the 2D illustrations when converting them into 3D. As there is no off the shelf solution to automatically render in this style we had to create each feature separately, using a number of different programs and approaches, which we then combined in order to achieve the exact 3D look we wanted.
Technical animation
The scene contained hundreds of individual elements and when it came to animating the trees there was simply too many to animate by hand. To combat this issue we developed an algorithm that would automatically animate the movement of the 3D trees depending on their distance from the car.
