Orange 'Animals'
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.
Dec 03, 2006
2 min read
Director: In a
Agency: Mother
Production: Blink Ink
Client: Orange
In a series of 8 commercials for the mobile brand Orange, we explored various situations within a fully CG space.
Racoon Push
Racoon Lift
Racoon Lift
Dolphin Push
Dolphin Lift
Canary Push
Canary Pop
Canary Lift
Panther Push
Panther Lift
Approach
As you can imagine, there was a lot of work to animate everything using physics while keeping it stable and directable. For this, I designed an approach for using them interactively.
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, and stiffness of key objects.
We did an extensive survey and photogrammetric 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 that would have been abandoned directly. The compositing was done in Shake completely and ended up being quite a proof that Shake has a place in commercials. Once again, the director proved to be a great person to work with; his patience and vision hopefully are visible in the final product.
Then I will run the software in a 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.
This 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.
From 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 in no time, so we could put all the effort into the actual rendering of them.
