Statefarm
Statefarm returned to Buck asking for some short animations to be put on their socials and website speaking to different advantages their company can offer the consumer. Our leads came up with some creative ways to showcase those and I was lucky enough to work on the 3D and Compositing of a few of those ideas. The first was titled Changing Lanes to cleverly hint to someone changing their course from the boring way they were going with their current provider and chooser a brighter and better path instead. It was a very easy animation so I got to spend a ton of time on the little details of the shot in the environment design. Loading and animating all those trees was tough on my machine but it turned out so great and we did a ton of minor color tweaks in comp to make the Statefarm building more bright and cheery compared to the ugly highway below. My role in the second animation was just on the comp side where I did some color correction to match brand colors and make everything feel more harmonious along with some effects across the environment. The second pieces was called the Savings Game talking about how being a safe drive rwith Statefarm can earn you tons of awards, kinda like playing a videogame ;)
Project Details: Create short animations to help visually explain different advantages of being a Statefarm customer to be placed on the website and across socials.
Animated in Cinema 4D, Designed in Cinema 4D, Rendered in Redshift, Composited in Nuke & AE
BG Variants
Statefarm requested we deliver all animations on their brand white and red. This turned out to be more of a challenge than expected since we had artists split between Nuke and AE and along with how both programs read color differently, our shadow alphas weren’t exporting well for AE to read them so we had to find a way to have the backgrounds built in both and matching. One of the lead artists, Daniel Pernikoff, had a ton of experience in colorspaces and was able to create a gizmo for Nuke to take a png out of any Adobe program and transform it’s colorspace to be read in ACEs in Nuke.
Process
One of our leads, Patrick Sluiter, created some sketches for us to follow. This was the one provided to me to start working from and populating the scene which led to the next few style frames. Over time, the scene changed some in the environment and you can see that even in animation we were modifying a lot.
One part of optimization we had to do was find a way to have the trees brought in as proxys but also have animation. Instead of baking out animation, we used redshift proxy’s and made a few small animations of each tree that was dropped into a randomized cloner to get the varying sizes and looks while keeping things clean and as procedural as possible