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November 2014

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www.postmagazine.com 40 POST NOVEMBER 2014 POSTINGS COOKING CHANNEL REFRESH ATLANTA — Tapped to refresh the well-established Cooking Channel brand, broadcast design studio Elevation (www.thisise levation.com) employed a multi-layered approach that centered on the brand's key unifying strengths while broadening its vision and infusing it all with new energy. The Elevation team began by expanding on Cooking Channel's sliding aesthetic. Using a grid design, senior designer Leonar- do Garcia Franchi was able to divide the screen based on the network's hero logo position, creating a consistent structure that anchored in the network's look, while providing new opportunities to move and configure the screen. Elevation then went to work on the IDs, developing three different styles encompassing logo branding. The pacing and rhythm of the package's animation was motivated by familiar cooking actions, such as cutting, chopping and peeling, and its sound design incorporated those sounds. The final toolkit features more than 130 separate elements, including backplates, bugs, closes, end pages, flexis, lower thirds, opens, snipes, stunt and special/marketing packages and transitions, all created in Adobe After Effects Project for each of six color palettes. Elevation also used ProTools for the sound design. THE MAGIC IS BRIGHTER CHICAGO — Spinmaster, makers of the popular Flutterbye flying fairy toys, recently reteamed with Calabash Animation (www.calabashanimation.com) to create The Magic Is Brighter — a new :30 spot that blends CG animation with live action. The spot, which was shot in a classic-style mansion located in Palos Verdes, CA, begins with an animated fairy fluttering past the Flutterbye logo, which quickly transitions into a shot of two young girls running down a long hallway chasing the fairy and a trail of pixie dust. A voiceover reads a poem highlighting all of the Flutterbye features, as Calabash's animated fairy and pixie dust blend seamlessly with shots of the actual toy in action. The combination of digital animation (created using a combination of Maya and Nuke), an adorable cast, and elegant cinematography brings the magical world of Flutterbye to life. According to executive producer Sean Henry, to help keep the CG from seeming stiff and artificial, the team started with a pass of hand-drawn animation that the CG anima- tors then used as a guide. From there, Henry says the CG team added realism "we could not have achieved through drawn animation alone." INSIDE THE TRAP & TRAPPING KAOS CULVER CITY, CA — The characters and world of Skylanders received the Blur Stu- dio (www.blur.com) treatment in two new :30 commercials produced by ad agency 72andSunny for Activision. With CG sequences helmed by Blur's Oscar-nominated director Jeff Fowler, Inside the Trap and Trapping Kaos feature an exciting new visual scope of the imaginative world of Skylanders. Familiar with Blur's 20-year experience in high-end CG entertainment, 72andSunny enlisted the studio to bring their cinematic chops to the popular franchise's CG charac- ters and environments for this new campaign. Fowler and his team of 30 artists com- pleted CG material for both spots in less than two months. The full arsenal of tools used included: Adobe Photoshop CS5 (concept design), Autodesk 3DS Max 2014 (modeling, lighting), Softimage 2014 (animation), Chaos Group V-Ray 3 (rendering), Chaos Group PdPlayer (review/playback), Eyeon Fusion 6.4 (compositing), Eyeon Generation AM (re- view/playback), Pixologic Zbrush 4 (character modeling), Sony Vegas 9.0 (editing) and The Foundry's Mari (additional character modeling).

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