The Social Networks' Net

Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and other social media channels help us manage contacts all around the world. However, it's still quite a challenge to bring all of these channels together. This is what Hootsuite wants to do and provide users access to all channels via Hootsuite. To spread the word about this new service, motion artist and animator Clement Morin was given the job of creating a film to show how the system works.

During the time enthusiasm for social media networks was steadily increasing, the television series 'Game of Thrones' became one of the most popular series amongst mainstream viewers and the series' excellent title sequence became known to millions of viewers. The concept that Clement's client wanted him to realize was a variation of the GoT title sequence in which social media channels appeared as stylized houses on a map. As with the original, the social media houses had to emerge like clockwork mechanisms.

"The biggest challenge was the deadline. The client wanted the film to be presented parallel to the start of the next GoT season. This meant that I had to be finished in 5 weeks, which was when the first Got episode for the following season was to be broadcast," remembers Clement. "First, I created the stylized map using grayscale height textures. The maps themselves were made up of simple primitives and planes, which were converted to splines using the Vectorizer object and subsequently extruded. The resulting shapes could then be easily animated or otherwise manipulated."

About modeling other element, Clement says: "I also used the GoT sequence as a reference for the other models and I worked with very simple geometry. I used the Octane render module for rendering, which uses GPU support for rendering. I was able to work a lot with render instances, which reduced the overall amount of geometry."

Asked which of the many Cinema 4D features was the most important for this project, Clemens clearly states that it was MoGraph: "Aside from the fact that MoGraph is one of my favorite Cinema 4D tools, it was indispensible for this project when it came to animating the numerous small elements. The Random, Shader and Delay effectors were combined to generate a slight randomness, lag and special shading," explains Clement.

Summing up, Clment explains that "Without Cinema 4D, 3D graphics would most likely not have become part of my professional repertoire. It would be great if other programs with which I work were so user-friendly, easy to use and easy to adapt to one's needs as Cinema 4D!"

Clement's video turned out to be a great boost for Hootsuite and has been viewed over 800,000 times!