Project Description
Ernest Charles is a maker of premium bird feed. Their parent company wanted to create an animation to use at point-of-sale locations within their stores.
Darke Studios and Elemental Media worked in tandem for the concept, and with storyboards in hand produced by ourselves, they pitched this to the client. The idea was that the illustrated birds from the bird feed packaging should be living and portrayed within live action scenes. Once the concept was signed off, Elemental and Darke handled the film production side of things. However, on the day of the shoot, Dom and Paula from Brace Media were on set to lend a hand and collect reference materials for the 3D animation.
The project was a challenge, ensuring the birds looked enough like their 2D counterparts while being 3D to bring to life. During the project, goals moved a bit here and there with additional 3D shots requested by Ernest Charles; and shots that were meant to be static (and so were shot against a static greenscreen) were then required to be moving, meaning that suddenly we had to create additional CGI. Things like this did increase the workload but we got through it. Modelling, animation and rendering was handled by our chosen tool, Lightwave 3D.
As the shed interiors were shot with greenscreen behind the window, we also needed to chromakey those shots, and add in season-driven background plates outside the shed.
After rendering in HD, we passed the sequenced back to Elemental Media who were handling the edit and grading on this occasion, who created the final loop-able sequence that would be on show in stores.
