directed by Smith & Foulkes 2010

I was the lead artist on this really creative commercial for Panasonic Australia.

Smith and Foulkes wanted this piece to appear as a single shot, leaning towards a stop-motion look.  The single shot idea became slightly problematic when trying to break it up into smaller chunks to assign to different artists.  After the storyboard stage, it was apparent that there were natural transitions in between each character set piece which we then decided we could cut up into 7 sections including transitions.  Our original plan was to assist these transitions between sections in the comp, but we ended up managing to handle nearly all of it in 3D.  The transitions were done with replacement models which helped the stop-motion look.

We worked with an artist called Mark Gmehling who created lots of original ‘twisty-limbed’ characters which were prompted by the Vincent Price style narration.  Gmehling would send through his models which were already posed, which we would then untangle and rig into something usable for animation.  We could then animate back into these poses and out of them into the next transition.  In terms of the look of the piece, we wanted to define a palette for the blacks which informed what each character could consist of.  We settled on 3 main shaders; a highly reflective one, a rubber skin type and a diffuse black for the clothing.

We worked slightly outside Nexus’s pipeline for this project, as we were lucky enough to have really good all-round artists who could take a shot through rigging, animatic, animation, then lighting and rendering.  This tightened up the crew and allowed for a more streamlined approach where all 7 shots were progressing at more or less the same rate.  This was an exciting way to work as the directors were seeing the whole commercial develop with each work in progress render.

We rendered without any motion blur as we wanted the viewer to be able to freeze the commercial at any point and see the work that had gone into all the transitions and models.  We didn’t want to smear the transitions to make it obvious what we were trying to hide – preferring to leave all the tricks out in the open.

A lot of fun to make!