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Spontaneous Combustion Creates Cinemax Summer Image Campaign

Spontaneous Combustion conceptualized, designed and conformed a 1 minute 20 second summer image promo, entitled "Max Blockbuster Summer," for HBO/Cinemax. Spontaneous design director Dana Yee said, "Our original intent was to incorporate a mosaic wall which would come to life and showcase a number of films. But during our brainstorming sessions, the focus shifted to graphics with more motion. We studied [fish schools] synchronized movements, how they seem to glitter and leave ripples in their underwater path and applied these characteristics to our test animations. We wanted the movements of the blocks to have a more natural, organic quality, rather than a completely computer generated appearance. The resulting visuals glisten, like sparkling jewels, as they jet around the screen." In the promo, a translucent block filters across a white background, reflecting the black and white Cinemax logo as it moves from right to left, revealing the phrase, "one word's worth a thousand pictures." A cube reflects a film clip as it flies on screen, followed by a flock of boxes that reverberate. The Spontaneous creative team included design director/art director Dana Yee; designers Dana Yee and Haejin Cho; AfterEffects artist Gary Tam; 3D animators Pakorn Bupphavesa, Gary Tam and Lawrence Nimrichter; inferno*/flame* artist Claudia D'Enjoy; managing director Roe Bressan; executive producer Sally Kapsalis; producer Charles Self; and assistant producer Tricia Chatterton. Spontaneous wrote custom scripts to help with the movement of the cubes, which also reduced the rate of the rendering process. The software used including AfterEffects 5.0, 3D Studio MAX 4.0, Softimage XSI 1.5, Photoshop, Illustrator, inferno* and flame*.

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Rick DeMott
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