The new Coke Cola advertisenment "It's mine", combines live action and computer animation. UnderDog, Stewie from Family Guy, and Charlie Brown character balloons from the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade battle it out for their coke. I looked at this animation ad at MSN video. It's awesome. I searched youtube then found the embed address. I pasted it below, hope you guys will interested in this wonderful animation.
Dan Wieden and David Kennedy made Super Bowl history by having four spots airing, including a new campaign for CareerBuilder.com.
The commercial was produced and designed by Wieden + Kennedy, with Creative Directors Hal Curtis and Sheena Brady.
The last project we were given for Advanced Animation was to create a short narrative animation.
From the start of the project, there had been a number of changes to my storyboard. My initial idea was to create a story about turtle and rabbit. However due to the enormous workload and limited time, I felt that almost the design would not work. Finally, I selected a topic about skipping class. The reason for choosing this theme is I think it will easily get responses from students. My story basis outline is of a turtle getting up later and lies about real reason of absenting the classes.
I created one animal character which is turtle, exterior environment and indoor scene for this story. The character is not a very difficult model. However I feel the final outcome of my model is slightly different as I imagined at the beginning. I thought the turtle must be very cute but when I showed the turtle to my friends, all of them said it is a dinosaur. I found it was hard to see the mouse while I set the camera in front of the turtle. The whole character just looks like a green egg with a pair of eyes. Therefore I had to put the turtle head a little bit higher in the screen shooting.
The exterior environment is consisted of a house, banana mailbox, trees and fense. I am very satisfied with these props and I put them at the beginning of the whole story. This exterior environment could explain the place where this story happened and I think it is good enough to attractive the audiences to watch the following scenes. Obviously, the indoor scene is not as good as the exterior. It is very simple, only consist of a bed, bureau, clock and chair.
The story should express several emotions such as panic (when turtle see the clock and find he was late for go to university); and silliness (when turtle try to dress his shell but make it in reverse). So the morph tool is one of the most important techniques I used in this animation. I have created totally 12 differnet motion in this animation.
There were no big problems in my turtle character. The rigging works fairly well. The only regretful thing was I didn’t use particle effects in this animation.
For the sound of the animation, the all clips were provided by http://www7.flash8.net/sound.shtml. This website has a lot of free materials and it is really helpful for my audio editing. The lighting is still same as my previous project. Three lights have been used in the movie scene, one omi and two target spot.
There are a number of things I want to improve in the future. 1. The story could be more interesting. 2. Using more props to represent the turtle’s life and then let audience know more about this turtle. Such as I can create some mess textbook on floor, then audiences will easily know this turtle is a student. 3. improve the rhythm of action. Especially on the cut which is turtle find he dressed his shell reverse. The rhythm is too slow, I think it can be more smoothly. 4. allocate more time on sound design. I am not pleased with sounds. Although I have already attempted to use more than one clips in this animation, it still can be improved in the future I think.
I felt the whole animation went according to plan. I think animation course project help me to be more confident with the techniques. I quite pleased with my final animation project.
The task we were given was to create 30 seconds advertisement in this term. I decided to use my favorite car- Mini Cooper to complete this animation advertisement project. It’s not too difficult for me to think about the storyboard. The basis idea of my advertisement is to present there are many color choices of Mini Cooper. I planed to set 4 different situations to match 4 different colors of Mini Cooper. But when I got this idea into the 3D work, I found a lot of problems. Therefore, I decide to reconsider my idea. The final piece of work still relies on the original idea which is present many color choices of Mini Cooper, but I have make it less complex.
The tough works in this project was to make a high polygon model of Mini Cooper and put texture on it. I haven’t created any high polygon model of car before. To be a beginner, I think the most important thing need to do before I started was to collect as much blueprints and references information as possible. The modeling consulted with 4 views of blueprints (top, side, front and back).
For the materials, I used shellac for car painting. The shellac always used in industry product. It consists with two parts, base material and shellac material. I chose falloff in the diffuse channel of base material. The reason for using shellac is that it can easily present the feeling of the metal painting of the car.
About lights, I still used the same method as my first identity work. There are three lights were created in the advertisement. The spotlight provided main illumination of scene. I chose a little bit blue Omi light and one target light as sub lights which was to divided car and background.
I kept the scene fairly simple so that the focus was on the Mini Cooper, I am pleased with the modeling and lighting of the scene. I am also happy with use shellac in my materials.
The things I would like to improve in the next time are: 1. Allocate more time on environment design 2. Use a particle system to generate smoke, or bubbles, or wind etc 3. Spend more time on sound design Although this advertisement work looks like tedious, I think the audiences will receive my conception. The only thing I have regretted is that I didn’t used rigging characters and particle system. I think I should use this knowledge in my final piece of work this year. Anyway, I quite like this module and the course work give us a lot of space to practice animation skills. Overall I quite pleased with my final work.
For my first 3D Animation project we need to produce an identity for channel 27 that will last for 30 seconds and it should combine both images and sounds. The identity will be created on 3D MAX 8.0.
Before I started to create my character, I first did a few research works on internet in order to find some examples of TV identity. The idea is slight on the Bubles on BBC 3 at the start of the programme.
Most of students have chosen robots as their characters but for me I want to do one that will let people easily remember. After deep consideration, I went for an animal character and finally I decided to produce a rabbit as my TV identity. I know it will be a tough target, but I think “the high element of risk makes you feel alive, tests what you are made of and how far you can take yourself."
I spent more than one week on creating my models. There are two parts of my models, furniture (TV, TV standard, sofa, floor lamp) and rabbit. It was not too hard for me to create furniture. All the furniture was started as a box, and then modified by editable poly, extrude and applied smooth mesh to flat the appearance. The most difficult part was to create a rabbit. I am not good at drawing pictures so if there is sample, it will be easy for me to create the character. Therefore I researched some rabbit pictures on internet before I started to model my character. The character’s animation includes a walk cycle, different expressions which involve the use of morphing for facial expressions, and movement of the body for body languages. I also use some texts to create the slogans in the movie. I use text program and bevel to create the 3D texts in my movie.
For the lights, I followed the knowledge, which we learned in lighting seminar last year. I use 3 lights in my movie scene, one is omi light that is set as my main light and the other two are target spots, which set as my sub lights. When the movie has lights, the other important thing is to find some music for it. Unfortunately, I am not good at editing sound in 3D max so I exported the whole movie and recorded sound in Adobe Premiere. The initial idea of my animation is to set Channel 27 as an extremely new Channel. The aim of my identity is to advertise channel 27 to the audiences in order to let them feel having more choice of the TV programmes.
The storyboard of my project consisted of 4 camera cuts. The first cut is a opening part, which shows the rabbit set in the sofa and watch TV .Through first cut I want to audiences concentrate on the rabbit. The second cut is that the rabbit is asleep. This cut is to lay a clue for next part. It has a potential meaning, which is tell audience you will get boring of a programme when you have watched it for long time. The third cut transfers the camera view from interior room to TV channel. The final cut I created is to use the movement of rabbit to introduce the TV programmes. For examples, if there is a Sports Channel, then I will modify a running action for the rabbit.
