Unbox Holiday

The Job

Another collaboration with Framestore on the new Shoe Carnival tv-spot. In this one we are flying drone-like past a festive Holiday train through a rich snowy landscape. We swoosh past the train wagons with the shoes popping out of the top. Again we are doing multiple versions of the spot but what's different is that only 1 version (embedded above) will be a long (25 seconds) with 3x shoe brand wagons connected, and 6x versions will be short (6 second) for single shoe brands.

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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

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The Process

While Framestore would work on storyboards & concept sketches with the client, we would be working on styleframes and asset build. Doing these things in parallel, meant we had to do some corrections to stay in line with the approved concepts. At times frustrating but unavoidable and expected.

Firstly we worked on atmospheric winterly landscape styleframes, to review with the client, to explore the new more rich Christmassy style. Luckily the client loved it all.

We built and rigged a yeti character based on delivered designs, a steam train with wagons, and we gave some of the characters of the previous production winter clothes.

Framestore delivered us shoe scans, which were insanely detailed so with a little bit of work these shoes were good for placing in the train wagons.

Based on the approved storyboard we created a quick animatic with temporary models. This time we decided to avoid the 1 continuous cam move, and do it in separate shots, save us lots of time and headaches.

Once the animatic was approved, our team of animators could work on different shots with semi-final characters.

Our Houdini expert was very busy this time, he worked on simulated snowplowing, falling snow flakes, smoke from chimneys, and the grooming of the luxurious fur coat of the yeti.

Our team would then fill the world with more trees, signs, and houses and what have you, and light each shot to visual perfection. Replacing the temp shoes with final shoes.

We rendered all shots in Redshift this time (nice and fast).. Thankfully we did not have to add sparkles anywhere.

Then Koolaburra objected to have their Uggs in the scene being handled by a damn dirty yeti, so we had to make a last minute special scene of just the Uggs popping out of the train wagon without our furry friend. :'-(

Because this animation had much more environmental depth and weather effects we had to do more complex compositing.

Some trickery was needed to make all the shots work perfectly as one film, in the long version and the short versions.

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

Lastly for the super wide key-visuals, we made custom scenes where we adjusted the layout a bit and added more objects to fill the wide views.