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bigFM - Speakers
bigFM, a German radio station, wanted to promote itself on Viva, a German television station. bigFM's agency Jung von Matt Neckar, decided to produce an entirely computer-generated commercial in collaboration with AixSponza that builds upon black speakers that symbolize the smallest building block of each music genre.
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The entire project (including concept and idea) had to be finished within two months. The actual production period was three weeks with four cg artists working on the project full-time.
Initially, many ideas were considered to fulfill bigFM's communication goals. However, after some testing the black speaker was thought to be best suited. After developing several animatics with different ideas involving the speakers, we got a sense of the ideas that work. After about three weeks, the final idea was decided upon: Speakers that create various musical instruments, ending with a dancing woman who collapses as the music stops.
The bigFM speaker commercial was a very demanding project as it relied heavily on massive particle effects. To realize this sort of animation, AixSponza used the Thinking Particles module that is integrated into MAXON's 3D package, CINEMA 4D. This particle engine allows for easy customization through code. After a period of intense research and development it was clear that a custom particle effect had to be created for each individual scene. While up to three artists worked on the camera and object animations, one developer focused solely on writing custom extensions for the particle system throughout the entire production process.
The entire project was realized using MAXON's CINEMA 4D and Adobe's After Effects on Apple Xeon Workstations. Technically, it was produced in different stages.First the story was developed as a rough storyboard. Then an animatic was produced to evaluate the different scenes and the commercials' editing. Now the camera animation, object animation and character animation took place. The project involved many aspects of 3D animation. For the character shots a character model had to be rigged, skinned and animated. The other shots needed custom expression setups to get the desired animation effects. After animating the entire spot traditionally, all the scenes where converted to particles. Next, the particle clouds were animated using custom scripted effectors. Finally, all the particles were converted to objects using MAXON's MoGraph module, as this allowed for further special effects, and above all, for the baking of the Thinking Particle sequences in order to be able to render them over our network.
At the same time, the shading was developed and a look was created. The footage was rendered as HDR files in many passes across a network consisting of about 20 computers. The final look was created via compositing. At this stage it was a big advantage to have all the 3D renderings as HDR files. This allowed exposure adjustments to be made in compositing and it was very easy to react to change requests by the client. Furthermore, we used the excellent 3D export features of CINEMA 4D to bring the camera animation into After Effects. This helped a lot in aligning lens flares and texture layers and making them move consistently with the rendered 3D footage.
Since this was a commercial for a radio station, the music played an integral role in the project. Jung von Matt had the idea to produce two different music pieces in order to have two music versions of the spot. Both were composed exclusively for this project, one by Jan Faszbender, the other by Bernd Kunz.
This spot was awarded a 2007 Clio Awards bronze medal and a gold medal at the 50th New York Festival's International Advertising Awards 2007.
Info
Creative direction: Jung von Matt - Tobias Eichinger, Till Hohmann
Creative direction: AixSponza - Christian Tyroller
Technical director: Manuel Casasola Merkle
Animation: Achim August Tietz, Christian Tyroller, Manuel Casasola Merkle
Compositing: Tobias Müller, Manuel Casasola Merkle
Music version A: Jan Faszbender
Music version B: Bernd Kunz
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