A couple of months ago, we were approached by one of our clients to create an animation for their live event. This was no typical animation, however, and when they began telling us their vision all of us here at Drawbridge Media started to get really excited.
What they wanted was a built-from-scratch, cinematic animation based on a theme of space exploration. After nailing down a treatment and script, here is what we came up with.
To create this animation, we wrote 3 separate treatments and helped the client choose the one that matched their theme the best. We then began to build our 3d environments, and all the shape elements that would eventually become our planets and spaceships. Because of the huge format, our lead animator, Marshall, needed to build the world in a lot of smaller pieces, and stitch them together.
We were also excited to be able to create a piece of original music for this video, courtesy of our in-house composer and most handsome colleague, Ryan Hamlin.
The next biggest challenge, as you can see from the video above, was the unorthodox size of the screens. The event would feature a circular screen in the center measuring 1080x1080, and a larger, rectangular screen on either side measuring 3240x1080. The screens would sync 3 separate video files and play them simultaneously. Clearly this was not a typical setup, and would require careful planning. The strange screen size also led us to make different design choices to better utilize the space.
After a few revisions and some tricky troubleshooting, we were able to deliver the final video in time for the event.