[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/34037654[/vimeo]
When we sent out our 2011 Holiday eCard, the overall response from clients, friends and family was great. Collectively, we thought the finished piece was pretty good — given the constraints and hurdles we encountered. But we certainly didn’t think it was good enough to fool and/or confuse people. Upon viewing the animation, there were lots of questions as to how or what it was we actually did. Some people thought all of the scenes were simply “plucked” from the original movie. Others thought we added some new scenes within the original; while a few thought we manipulated the original scenes and added in new elements. As flattering as those speculations are, none of them are true, so we decided to write-up a little story and show you some “behind the scenes” stuff on how the eCard came about.
The overall idea was thought up by one of our designers, Ryan Gamache, who was tasked with creating a holiday card. He thought, “Wouldn’t it be cool if we did an animation that mimicked Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer instead?” After pitching the idea to Dan Dinsmore, Overit’s CEO, and being given the green light, Ryan drew up some rough storyboards which he provided to the O Studios division — Overit’s sister company that handles all things film, motion and audio related. Using the rough boards, an animatic was cut to define the shot lengths and overall pacing of the piece. Our 3D General, Elias Elias, modeled and rigged the characters using still frames from the original movie as reference. Once completed, textures were applied, scenes were lit and animated, followed by rendering and post effects.
[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/34520378[/vimeo]
So, in a nutshell, we created the entire piece from scratch in 3D. For a couple of the shots, we matched the camera move and character animations as best we could to really nail the look and feel of the original classic. We initially toyed with the idea of going all out and creating the piece with stop motion animation, but we simply didn’t have the time. Our next best option was to utilize 3D animation and, when animating, step the character poses to appear as if they were stop motion animated. The result, we think, is fairly convincing, aside from a few minor details, glips and glitches. We hope you enjoyed it as much as we did creating it.
Between each department we have here at Overit, our team has the ability to captivate an audience and entertain like no other. Besides the obvious example from the holiday eCard, you can see this in action by checking out our work with brands like Toyota, Trump Vodka and AWS Truewind at our website, overit.com.
So what big changes are in store for Overit this year? You’ll just have to wait and see!
