Research - adverts

While Chérie and Mary looked at feature length films, i thought about looking at shorter animations - in the form of adverts.

Seeing as we would be more likely to create an animation closer to long advert length, i looked into this, and how long it took to make them and also what kind of style and techniques they used.

Our intial thought was to go for something like the sprite advert, because of the sprite goblin, but i watched a few of the adverts and was unable to find any info about how the advert was actually made. I also discovered how difficult it was to navigate around the coca cola site :S

Anywho, i thought of other adverts to look at. In one of our Visual effects lectures, we had been shown an advert for the country life spreadable butter advert by framestore (http://www.framestore-cfc.com/commercials/dairycrest/index.html). In this ad, a mother, having just ushered her (very messy) children off to school was faced with the cleaning up. So you buttered a slice of toast, and all of a sudden came a bunch of animals to do the cleaning for her! All of the animals were modeled in maya, except for a few stray rabbits and a sheep. It took about 12 weeks to model and texture, and the ad spent a whole 3 months in post production, to get the scene looking completely real and believable.

I then found, on the framestore site, another amazing animated advert. The post office advert (http://www.framestore-cfc.com/commercials/postoffice_twins/index.html) is a firm favourite of mine, with the 3d ants living their own lil lives amongst us. The advert i watched was called "twins", where two of the children ants are playing with their RC cars and have an accident. They start talking about car insurance then break out into a fight, all good fun! What i likes about this ad is that the characters in it were so much more basic, and very cartoony, which i would say is much more our groups style. And the advert had been made so well, and the character personalities really made the whole thing more watch-able. The kids sounded and acted like kids, and were cute. Also, this animation took 3 weeks to model and texture and spent only 2 weeks in post production. This shows just how much difference using less texture and realism can make on time taken.

This was something that the group discovered generally though all of our research - that is was too difficult to go for a realistic, fur texture and all the other crazy stuff for our animals. Realistically, we dont have that much time. It would be better to stick with skin like textures - it worked so well with the ants.

Next - character designs. We each have our own ideas, we just need to pull them together.



-Harn