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Hello again and welcome to this first blog of “making of“. It’s February, the month of love. For us, however, every month is the month of love: love of our work, love of 3D art, love of innovation and quality, love of having happy customers. Let’s talk about a 3D animation project focused on social media marketing for St. Valentines day!
We should start by saying a big thank you to Impacta Comunicación, an advertising, marketing and branding agency of Zaragoza, for trusting us to carry out this Project. Impacta Comunicacion has been in the world of marketing for many years and has come up with projects for important brands like El Tostadero, Universidad San Jorge, Intu. They even received an award for having the best marketing strategy by IPMARK! Needless to say, we were very excited about working with them.
Aire Sano is the leading brand in the production of Jamón de Teruel D.O.P. whose marketing campaign designed by Impacta “Everything is true” focuses on highlighting 4 principles of their product which has a Certification of Animal Welfare and a couple more for being antibiotic, lactose, sulphites and gluten-free.
The 3D animation was going to be made for the Saint Valentine’s Day campaign and the day of “Amantes de Teruel”; a local celebration based on a romance story with two deaths caused by love as a consequence of a fatal misunderstanding.
The idea generated by the creative designers of Impacta was to post some content on their social networks and website, celebrating love in all its forms and closing the video with its logo over a background of ham petals pretending to be rose petals falling down in slow motion.
Making of 3D Animation Step by step
- Artistic Concepts and Storyboards
- Modelled textures, illumination and animation
- Rendering and postproduction
Artistic Concepts and Storyboards
Like many of our 3D and digital projects, they all start with the simplest tools such as a piece of paper and a pencil, because it might be a wee old school style, but the speed and versatility of generating and representing ideas to customers in 3D animations with a storyboard cannot be achieved otherwise (and vintage style is a thing nowadays, isn’t it?).
In this first part, we study the product, the idea and concept and we try to mix and observe how the petals would be together, how stiff the ham is, how fast is the ideal speed and so on.
Once at least one idea was conceptualised (in this case there were two) we were able to continue with production.
Modelled textures, illumination and animation
We started with modelling. It had been decided to use rose petals that would appear out of focus at the background and we would use a second technique, photogrammetry, for the foreground petals. With me so far? No worries, I’ll explain in more detail!
With the modelling and texturing already done we focused on the lighting that would allow us to illuminate the entire scene evenly without producing undesirable shadows through the petals of 3D animation.
Animation, composition and camera point of view were very important in this project, the three were related. The speed of the fall should be constant and should not vary much among the 3 focus planes, the petals that fall in the close-up of the camera should be controlled so as not to obstruct the visibility of the logo of Aire Sano.
For that reason the action was divided into 3 camera planes: A) the front (close up) slightly out of focus falling down the sides, B) a background plane very out of focus and with a high density of petals to avoid seeing the real background and C) the main plane that would be shown at all times and where our eyes were going to look at so that the logo could stand out above the rest of the image.
Rendering and postproduction
To finish, we carried on with the postproduction and composition of layers and video composition. To maintain full control of the animation and since we had previously divided it into the 3 camera planes, we rendered and composed these 3 planes separately.
As the product was a gourmet product, the Teruel ham, there was no previous reference or material to access, so we suggested generating all the resources from scratch. For this, we were going to need to perform photogrammetry in some cases and obtain product textures somehow in other cases.
Photogrammetry 3D
First, the ham; we needed to represent perfectly the client’s product, so we used the real product, by getting a real ham, we could get the slices and see in detail what they looked like.
And from a Bauhaus perspective, we began to experiment with our mouth-watering ingredient; its flexibility, consistency and so on. We started to trim it, cook it, fry it, etc to carefully analyse the material and come up with the best outcome. Yeah, if you started reading this post from this paragraph you might think we are describing the last Master chef tv programme.
Fun fact! We used a toothpick to keep the proper shape when carrying out the photogrammetry which consisted of taking many photographs from many angles around the product to obtain a lot of points of view for the 3D production. There you go, a slice of this delightful ham so you can see how real it looks like. The pity of not being able to grab it from the screen is real too, huh?
To sum up, we could have written more about each step but that would be too tempting, wouldn’t it be? So I’ve focused on the most interesting facts as a sample of all the work behind a 3D animation of these characteristics.
We loved working on this Project. We are very satisfied with the result achieved and the fact that we have created all the necessary resources from scratch. Yay!
3D Animation Done Right!
3D animation focused on marketing involves many technical and artistic challenges. An artistic knowledge of photography, audiovisual production and modelling, texturing, lighting, etc is absolutely essential for us.
Our motto is based on scheduled times and continuous changes, a constant, clear and direct communication to find the exact idea of the creative and the ability to offer various solutions to enrich the possibilities and the final result of the animation.
We are able to offer other 3D animation services, such as product animation or architectural movies, which share many of the principles explained in this “Making of”. Everything lies in our technical and creative capacity to communicate the same emotions that our clients want to represent in your 3D animations.
Thanks again to Impacta Comunicacion and Aire Sano for having relied on us. It’s been a true pleasure working with you all for your St. Valentines campaign.
Lots of Love,
Cristina from Francos & Costa
and explore our upcoming making-of posts and other news in our newsroom. See ya!
Image References
- Logo “El Tostadero” ( http://www.eltostadero.com/ )
- Logo “Universidad San Jorge” ( https://www.usj.es/ )
- Logo “Unnefar” ( https://www.unnefar.es/ )
- Logo “Intu” ( https://www.intugroup.co.uk/en/ )
- Logo “Aire Sano” ( https://airesano.com/ )
- Logo “Todo es Verdad” ( https://todoesverdad.com/ )
- Le petit prince by foulard a pois ( https://www.flickr.com/photos/foulard_a_pois/5357275668/ )