Guru animation studio just completed four 3D animated commercials for the Nabisco Planet Snak campaign. While the original spots in the three-year campaign had been hand drawn by guru sister studio Chuck Gamage Animation, agency FCB Toronto and their client Nabisco were looking to enrich the visuals, so they turned to guru's animators and rendering artists. To capture the look pioneered in the pilot commercial, guru used more cinematic camera work, atmospheric lighting and "animated" performances to help distinguish the campaign. The first in the series finds three stranded space heroes, Captain Baker, Steve the Robot and D'oh, on an epic 30-second adventure, discovering the remains of an ancient civilization, the "Lost City of Cheese," far beneath the surface of Planet Snak. The second spot features DOh airing out his grievances to an empty spaceship or so he thinks. The other two spots show the characters cavorting with aliens, messing with the time-space continuum and unintentionally revealing a few of the true feelings they harbor for each other. For guru, the challenge lied in adapting the 3D models to the original hand drawn designs. Many of the stylistic elements employed in drawings by cel animators needed to be re-interpreted for the new medium. In translating the characters' recognizable features from 2D to 3D, the guru animators learned how to be faithful to the essence of the characters, rather than copying the original designs. All characters were modeled, set-up and animated in Maya. The spots were rendered in Maya and composited in After Effects and Inferno.
