Unbox a world of shoes

The Job

Three full-cg tv-spots to be produced back to back. The first spot (above) takes the viewer into the Shoe Carnival store interior, zooming drone-like past all the brand departments and encountering the customers unboxing all the fun at Shoe Carnival. For the ‘Back to School’ campaign our mission was to highlight the different brands and styles with an adventurous drone flight through different themed product vignettes. Fly through a box of Big-Time fun, going from playgrounds to hallways, from science labs to study rooms, each thematic world designed to complement the brands.

‍

My Role

— Client point of contact for all production and financial needs

— Scoping, budgeting, planning, and scheduling all milestones/reviews

— Finding and booking freelancers / planning resources

— Clear communication between all stakeholders and personnel

— Managing team from pitch to final delivery

— Managing client reviews, approvals, and deliveries

— Invoicing, collecting final assets, approved credit lists and portfolio live dates

‍

The Process

Framestore would do storyboards & concept sketches and deliver us assets, like shoe models, characters, anything, as long as we (Colorbleed) used the Arnold render engine.

Framestore's assets were ingested into our pipeline. Our team had to do some model and lookdev adjustments. The characters needed rigging for animation.

We had a style development phase where we took time to build styleframes with the featured shoe brand in the environment, based on the client's concept sketches.

Once the client was happy and we got approval, we connected all the (6x) environments with temporary shoe models, with one drone-like camera move, resulting in 2 complex identical timelines though different rooms.

When the camera move was deemed "perfect enough", we seperated the environments again, keeping the camera move as is, so our team of animators could focus on the different environments. They would be adding the animated characters, animating details like flipping pages of a book, bouncing balls, twiling leafs, dust, etc.

Our Houdini expert added some simulated natural movements like unfolding/waving fabrics, swining ropes, and dust movement.

In the mean time our LRC team would fill the environments with more details and textures, and light it to visual perfection, finally (before rendering) replacing the shoe models with the final versions (the stars of the show).

We rendered all the shots in Arnold (nice and slow).. and when that was done, in compositing we brought all the environments back into one continuous camera move again.

Last but not least adding some sparkles with a plugin. (yes, the client wanted sparkles, we are not proud)

We sent the client Prores 444 sequences with mattes for them to make all the adaptations, localizations.