Sat 7th Jul 2012 | News
Mio campaign gets a dose of new CG energy from Psyop.
Psyop recently finished a six spot campaign for Kraft's new product called 'Mio'. Now that all six are online I wanted to show them off as a whole series. The studio had a great process to develop and bring the characters and the bar that they reside in together. Jon Saunders of Psyops brought the series to our attention, and discussed the processes which included a few brand new techniques for Psyop.
"We actually didn't use any face scans, but instead captured performances from improvisational actors filmed during our voice-over sessions," explains Jon Saunders, Creative Director at Psyop. "This allowed for natural comedy to emerge from the scripts (many of the scripts were dramatically altered mid-performance based on ad-libbing), and gave our animators a visual script to follow while still allowing them to inject their own imagination into the character's performance. This method veers away from the sometimes mechanical look of motion capture and allows our animators to inject their creativity into the spots but gives everything a solid guideline to start from.
For the set the characters live in we decided against shooting live action plates, but instead we captured high resolution stills and projected those images onto 3D geometry. This gave us control of the camera later in the process and also give us the ability to marry the design of the characters to the design of our set in a way that really blends everything together to create an illustrative look instead of the usual 3D characters rendered in a live action set.
“There was a huge time savings in doing things this way,” explains Saunders. “We didn’t have to worry about tracking live action plates and getting our 3D cameras to match that movement. We just did all our camera moves in 3D and relied on our team of lighters and compositors to sell the look—which they did with flying colors.”
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