motion504 Creates In-Store Branding for Target Stores

Positioning themselves creatively between reality and dreamlike fantasy, Minneapolis, Minnesota USA- based broadcast design and animation company motion504 used CINEMA 4D to craft new in-store advertising for Target stores.

This work was meant to illustrate Target’s inspired method of marketing books. motion504 nailed this task with two spots, one each to highlight Target’s Best Sellers and its Bookmarked program.

Target’s Bookmarked program provides the online tools necessary to start and manage your own book club and even selects the books for you, called Club Picks. motion504 chose to communicate this by walking the viewer into a soft, inviting landscape with a magical feel. A red-leafed tree is brimming with birds, one of which flies up in front of the sun then towards you as it morphs into a book that gently lands in your hands. Target’s goal for this spot was to promote trust with the customer; the tree represents the store and the bird/book represents the Club Pick selection, which they have conveniently handed you.

Bestsellers brings you in very close to the pages of an open book, then flies you across a group of books with pages that undulate in seemingly choreographed moves and culminate in spelling out the word “Best.”  As you pull away, the word “Sellers” comes into view on a closed book’s spine in the foreground, lining up perfectly to create the phrase “Best Sellers.”  

Founder and Creative Director, Andy Reynolds, says, “We worked to find the balance between realism and surrealism. The textures were fantasy and the motion was real. CINEMA 4D’s very intuitive feel was instrumental in our creative process. It integrates extremely well into our pipeline, and the designers find they can create more and better content in the allotted time. CINEMA 4D feels like it does not come between you and the project.”

One of motion504’s goals was to find the most efficient way to render with “wonderful” lighting. “We did a Multi-Pass render and the final comps in After Effects. The time it saved was incredibly helpful on this project. We were able to render out everything – color, shadows, ambient occlusion, and so on – to bring all of the layers into After Effects and build the scene back up to keep the lighting just as we wanted. It was a great balance of overall warm light while keeping a nice level of deep shadows,” says Renolds.

Another time saver was the Net Render module. “The Net Render module is the easiest network rendering solution we have ever used and allows us to easily distribute renders, which saves us time as well as allowing us to experiment more in any stage of the project,” observes Reynolds.

The motion504 design team realized their vision using CINEMA 4D and Adobe’s Photoshop and After Effects on the Macintosh.

Agency: motion 405
Client: Target