Every new project starts with a creative meeting. This time we went to advertising agency JWT Amsterdam to work with the creatives Tjerk Jan van den Oord and Ben Goedgebuur. At the image above illustrator and art director, Dimitri Versteegen, presents the first design sketches. The man wearing blue is our director, Peter Mansfelt, thinking of ways how to construct and film this new challenge.
When the designs are finished, we do some material tests. At the picture above you can see Dimitri experimenting with the different fabrics, textures and and other materials we could use for the bigger set.
Meanwhile, the director instructs the animator, Jurjen Kraan, to create an animatic to visualise the storyline. The director also starts researching the exact sizes we would work with. As you can see it will be very hard to avoid having an insane huge set :-).
After deciding the sizes, we start working on the constructions that would make it possible to animate each and every part of the set. Before we started building, every technical design was measured up on paper.
After finishing all the technical stuff, we start with texturing the elements. This was an interesting process, because we had to use old materials that were used in ING offices. We used parts of lamps, desks, chairs, couches, promotional materials, shirts, etc.
As you can see the director has a "hands on" mentaity, he tests all constructed materials himself.
After the final touches, the DOP, Michale Brooke, started to do his magic tricks on the set. He needed to make sure tha camera would work in high speed as well as single frame mode. Also the motion control needs to be tested proparly. We used Dragonframe software and motioncontrol box to control up to 12 animating elements a time.
The only thing that is missing in these images is the big table we used for the globe. This table hides all technical constructions.
