Created for TotallyMoney, the advert melds 2D, and 3D animation, capturing a hand-painted feel, making every frame look like an individual painting; the short conveys the client’s customers’ determination to climb towards their goals.
International mixed media and animation studios LOBO and Ground Control recently teamed up to create the animated commercial, You’ll Totally Get There. Made for TotallyMoney, the animation features a painterly style melding with 3D animation, which conveys the determination of the client’s customers as they climb higher toward their goals.
The studio’s team created the short’s hand-painted feel by making every animation frame look like an individual painting – including texture and configuration of brush strokes. When played in sequence, the result was a “jittering” effect indicative of artisanal frame-by-frame animation, accomplished using a combination of tools and mixing 2D and 3D animation.
Created in Adobe Photoshop, the backgrounds’ various brush strokes were painted over the original artwork, creating different iterations of the same scenarios looped to produce that living “fluttering” effect.
The character animation was produced in 3D using Maya, with Houdini providing additional cloth simulation for the bride’s dress. The characters were already given a painterly finish during the look development phase, but it was static. Photoshop artists picked up the renders and painted over four frames for each second of animation, making the brush strokes display the desired randomness across the frames.
The 3D renders and corresponding paint-overs went to Nuke for compositing. Next, a Machine Learning tool interpolated between the hand-painted frames, creating different textures for every frame in the animation. Next, the backgrounds got the same treatment, and everything went to Nuke. Finally, the team used DaVinci Resolve for some color grading work.
The result was an animated advert reflecting the artistry of what appears to be a beautifully hand-painted piece - check it out:
The ad marks the first branded content partnership between the animation studios, who recently joined forces to represent the UK and Asia markets.
Source: LOBO
Debbie Diamond Sarto is news editor at Animation World Network.
