After joining forces on a successful TV campaign, Audible.com [1] approached Framestore' [2]s Design Department, enlisting the team to imagine a 15-second animation to be displayed on a digital cube screen in Times Square. The idea was to create an animation that would illustrate a single audiobook genre using a smart phone's headphone chords. For this particular project the theme was science fiction.
The challenge was choreographing an animation based on two square screens that met at 90-degree angles and were wrapped around the corner of a building. The team had to find a way to tell the same story on both individual screens while also developing a way to do something unique with the merging corner, keeping it interesting for anyone viewing from that angle.
Maryanne Butler, Framestore's Head of Design, NY, explains, “The brief was both exciting and challenging. We came up with the idea of creating an alien face made up of two halves that would join in the middle for a quick 'blink'. The result was very fun and seeing the piece in Times Square was an added bonus."
Designers Zack Lydon and Dan Solomon created the alien and spaceship images along with the animation, which was hand-drawn in Flash, traced using Illustrator curves, then imported and converted in Houdini. Head of 3D Commercials, NY, David Mellor translated the animation curves into fully rendered 3D chords attached to a modeled CG phone, bringing the project to life.
Audible.com, the world's largest producer and seller of digital spoken-word entertainment, offers customers more than 100,000 audio programs from leading audiobook publishers, broadcasters, entertainers, magazine and newspaper publishers and business information providers. Audible has established itself as daily service for anyone seeking to be more productive, better informed, or more thoughtfully entertained.
Source: Framestore
Links:
[1] http://audible.com
[2] http://framestore.com/
[3] https://vimeo.com/help/faq/embedding