Honeystars Birdmen Comercial

One workmate reminded me today that I had a blog (thanks Desiree). After going through the topical excuses I had to admit that I haven't posted anything for months due to pure lazzyness.

To retake again our relationship, dear unknown visitors, I have chosen the subject of an animated commercial. It was produced at Uli Meyer studios (http://www.ulimeyer.com/) in nov-dec 2005. The whole project consisted in the production of two comercials and a redesign of the product's mascot Captain Star. The new design would be the center of a new international product relaunch campaign for the Nestle Honeystars breakfast cereals.

I'm going to use a lot of artwork created by other artists from the studio, so I hope they don't mind. If some artwork is wrongly credited please let me know and I'll fix it.

The two comercials produced where: "Honeystars Birdmen" and "Honeystars Strawberry". Both are a mix of 2d animated characters, CG animated characters and CG starships. I was in charge of the cg look development,cg character development and cg animation. I worked directly in only one of the comercials, the birdmen, but the starships from that one where used in the strawberries one too.

I think it may result interesting to some of you see a bit of the process of producing a commercial and also the progress from the designs to the final animated film. So here we go.

The First step is the pitch. The agency shows the idea to different studios and every studio presents back his own vision of the commercial in a concept state. Then the agency shows one of the options to go ahead. The idea here was some robotic birds to atack a cargo of honeystars breakfast cereal? and then the captain stars (the bear) saves the day. Here are some of the concepts from the pitch (by Matt Jones http://mattjonezanimation.blogspot.com/ and Michael Shlingman http://drawnography.blogspot.com/:

The clients where looking for a new design of the Honeystars Captain Star main Character so the concept artists tried a few different styles. If I remember properly it was Matt Jones who designed the final version:

Here are some designs for the kids that travel in the starship with the captain also by Matt Jones. The sculpture is by Cako Facioli.

While the characters where designed, the CG starships where also modelled by Leo Sanchez. The idea was that the captain ship would combine with the kids ships to create a super defensive weapon with the shape of a star.

cg models by Leo Sanchez



When those cg ships models where finished based on the concept designs you have seen in the pitch, Matt Jones took one of the cg renders in grey and painted over in Photoshop to determine the final look.

2D starship design by Matt Jones
Having this fantastic references makes my life a lot easier when I have to reproduce that look in CG. All the details are perfectly defined: color, line color, line thickness, gradients, level of detail, etc. Achieving that kind of flat 2d look in cg is not easy, especially because of the outlines. Cg outlines tend to pop in an out in a single frame breaking the continuity in the animation, therefore ruining the experience. To avoid that the modelling should be very specific, creating geometry edges that draw lines in the exact positions and faces that break at certain angles... well, I'm not doing a tutorial so I'll stop the technical mumbo jumbo. Here is what you want to see: pictures!!

cg final starships by Joan Cabot

And now, finally, my favourite part of the show: The mighty Birdmen. I think is a cool character design by mr Matt Jones and I had a great time developing the it in CG and finally doing the animation. Here are some concept drawings and poses:

I started modelling a simple version of the character with simple shapes to set the main pose and proportions. I also did a simple rig and an animation to use it in the animatic.

Then, once the final high resolution model was finished I started to create the shaders that define the look of the character. That part is a back and forth process between me and the concept designers that keep refining the details of the character on the go. Here you can see a cg render of the birdman and the same image after been retouched in photoshop and the comments about the changes.

Finally when all the elements are ready the animation starts. The first step in the animation process is to create an animatic to set the camera position, the basic shot action, the shot duration and to test the rithm and flow of the action.

Then I took every shot and started the animation of the starships. That was priority because the 2d animators need the cg reference to animate the kids inside the starships.

The final step was animate the six birdmen for all shots. Here is the final result.