Pinball, Pachinko, CINEMA 4D and 25 Years MAXON

As the creators of CINEMA 4D, MAXON has seen a lot and it’s not easy to make this team’s jaws drop.

After viewing one of the many animations in particular, wishing MAXON well for their 25th anniversary the team at MAXON was speechless…

The animation in question was sent in from Japan – and seemed very inconspicuous at first. Initially, the team at MAXON didn’t know what to think as a Mac GUI appeared, accompanied by playful music. But then CINEMA 4D is started and a somewhat peculiar scene is loaded and the animation in the scene is played… and the animation unfolds its magic, creating astonished looks on the audience’s faces.

This film, created by the animation team at Japan-based WOW studios, with the title On-Desk-Top quickly turns into a tour de force of CINEMA 4D functions and transforms into a pinball game, then into a Japanese Pachinko game. The blue ball is then freed from the MAXON logo and is sent on a journey between virtual and real worlds. File folders are turned into obstacles on a virtual desktop and everything is re-arranged until the blue ball finally escapes the computer monitor and sets off a chain of seemingly real dominos, which in the end prove to also be animated.

This interplay between the real world and the virtual world is a trademark of the WOW team’s work, which is evident on their website where several works can be seen that have a similar concept. An integral part of WOW’s work are computer graphics created with CINEMA 4D, in particular MoGraph, which is often so well integrated that it is not even recognizable as such.

 

As in the MAXON anniversary film, imagery often appears whose dynamics tell the trained observer: MoGraph was used here. For example, WOW created a film for a calligrapher’s exhibition in which stylized imagery of an undulating ocean suddenly appears, which is made up of Japanese fonts. Elsewhere in the film, storms consisting of petals fly through the scene or pillars made of cubes move through the scene in an orderly and organized fashion. In most of the WOW team’s animations, which they create using CINEMA 4D, the bridge between abstract worlds and our real world can easily be made out. Often, photorealistic images are used in WOW’s animations to symbolically ask the question where computer graphics end and reality begins.

The creative team at WOW wander between two worlds and are masters of advertising, art and traditional as well as modern techniques – and they meander between these worlds with ease. The buoyancy of their work is also present in the MAXON anniversary film, which lived up to the studio’s name and caused a “wow” effect amongst the viewers. This effect not can not only be seen at MAXON: within only 20 days, more than 56,000 people have viewed the video online – which is what you should do as well and let yourself be “wowed”!

Client
MAXON Japan

Website
w0w.co.jp/