Previs

I have been working on the animatic lately, and from working with it, I learned that there was a lot of things in my storyboard that could be better, faster and more interesting.
The animatic is a mix of playblast and After Effect animations that is been put together and timed.
So far I am happy with the length of it. I was afraid that it would be longer than 60 seconds, which it was when I first started working on the previs. But after changing some things, speeding some things up and combining shots, I found that I was still able to deliver the same message  in a shorter amount of time.

Here is the result:

(The backgrounds is something that I am still working on, so the background that has been used here is not meant to be used)

 There is still some work to be done, and some missing elements.

earth + map

I have been playing around with an idea lately. I just had to test it out and I am actually really happy with the result that I gained when I tested it.
I recently watched an After Effects tutorial on YouTube that showed you how to make a flat map fold itself. I really liked the simple look of it and I started playing with ideas on how to implement it in my own work, being that I really wanted to test it out.
In my commercial there is a scene where we see the earth and then zoom in on it, focusing on the great wall of china. After a few seconds, the camera zooms out again. But what if, when we zoom out the earth fold out and turn into a flat map. This map could be folded and end up in the shape of a refrigerator and would make a smooth transition to the next scene that actually is a refrigerator.
I tried it, and I liked it. I showed it to my father and he really liked the idea too.

To make this happen, I had to make a round object turn into a flat object. First I tried folding a plane around a sphere, hoping that I could create something from that. It didn’t work and it looked bad. Then I tried to fold out a sphere and played with blend shapes, but that didn’t work either. Lastly, I found a solution that was easy and worked perfectly.
I simply made a plane, created a nonlinear bend two times going in two different directions. Then I bended them both 180 degrees and voila I had a sphere!
This is the result of my first test.

CFC

Lately, I have been trying to figure out how I am going to show the CFC circulating in the refrigerator and how I am going to animate this. Because CFC is an invisible gas and doesn’t evoke any odor I figured I would just make simple spheres that move inside of the pipes. I talked it over with my father, and he approved of the idea. The point of this shot is simply to demonstrate that the refrigerator contains the gas and that it will leak if the appliance gets damaged.

I ended up drawing a curve and extruded a cylinder along it. This cylinder is now the pipe and the curve inside of it I made into a motion path for the spheres.

Then I made enough spheres to fill the whole piping system before I looped the animation. 

To make the spheres “escape” from the pipes, I drew 3 more curves that went outside of the refrigerator and created new motion paths out of them. I wasn’t sure about how to make the spheres change from one motion path to another, especially when I had made the animation infinitely. To solve this, I duplicated the spheres when they were at the root of the new curve and connected the new ones to the new motion paths. I turned off the visibility on the original at the same time that I turned in the visibility on the duplicates and it now looks like the spheres are exiting the pipes leaving the refrigerator emptied from CFC.

I don’t know if this was the most efficient solution, but I achieved what I wanted from it.