This is one of those really complex and exciting projects I have worked, and although it looks minimal work the fact is that it is just the opposite as everything is CG in this batch of 12 commercials.
A series of 8 commercials for the mobile brand Orange, we explored various situations within a fully CG space.
Racoon Push
Racoon Lift
Dolphin Push
Dolphin Lift
Canary Push
Panther Push
Racoon Pop
Approach
As you can imagine there was a lot of work to animate everything through physics but at the same time to be stable and directable, for this I designed an approach on how to use them in an interactive way.
The idea was to have the software in “live” mode so the mouse and keyboard input were fed directly onto the physics engine XSI provides and affect the forces, weight, stiffness of key objects.
We did extensive survey and photogrametric measurements of the space while working hand in hand with the photographer to maintain his print campaign style and look. We did revamp the way we animate by using real time physics so all the decision making was with the director in front of us and we explored many avenues otherwise would have been abandoned directly. The compositing was done in Shake completely and ended up being quite a proof Shake has a place in commercials. Once again the director proved a great person to work, his patience and vision hopefully are visible in the final product.
Then I will run the software on loop capturing everything and move the mouse and pressing keys to trigger events.
Then, once we have practised a lot we would sooner or later get the knack of it and be able to actually direct the action as we wanted more or less.
Which was the moment in which I ran the software in full recording mode, hence creating keyframes for my actions and many long takes were taken until we were happy with the various solutions.
Fron that point onward the animation was baked and physics killed so we had only keyframes to fix and some minor adjustments here and there.
This naive method permitted us to create the animation of these 12 commercials on no time so we could put all the effort on the actual rendering of them.
Credits
Director: Kalle Haglund Agency: Mother Production: Blink Ink Task: VFX Supervisor
