The Mane Attraction

Taylor James was approached with this unique project by the award-winning ad agency GSW Worldwide to produce a print and motion campaign for a major Pharmaceutical brand. The campaign initially featured the beautiful adaptation of an Eagle; but recently the project took on two more animated concepts aptly titled, Horse and Jet. Our role was to create 3D animations completely in CGI, starting with a golden triangle that would then form into the various elements, figurative of three key themes: progressive, powerful and iconic – the latter, represented by the first animation, the eagle.

The stunning moving images were created by using a control mask across the models and then having a procedural animation script that would then follow the direction allowing us to control our procedural animation. When working on a project that has animation and print, it’s key to produce consistent results and part of this is making sure the same procedures were used on each one. We used scripts written to automate certain tasks and produce consistent results. These can be used on animation and print jobs and are written for each project by our R & D Department.

Having been commissioned to work on the eagle first, when it came time to bring together Horse and Jet, Taylor James already had a pipeline in place to produce extra images and animations in the same style. The Horse animation required some further research and development to create a script that could unfold the triangles on the moving and de-forming horse, which gave our R&D department a few headaches! Having the original animation script as a base allowed us to just further develop the script to work on a de-forming mesh; we managed to solve the problems and produce the same high quality results keeping the quality of the work consistent throughout.

Housing all production and post-production disciplines under one roof, we were able to build one asset and animate it whilst positioning it for print. Traditionally, you would have an animated production company doing one part of the campaign and a print studio doing another. Most of the time they don’t quite match up and can lack unity across the separate medias, and additionally tend to cost the clients and agencies a lot more money as assets aren’t being shared between print and motion.

The animation was an extra challenge on the eagle; with over 10,000 triangles it would have been impossible to animate them all unfolding by hand. There is no built-in button or tool in our software to do this, so our R&D department tackled this by creating a bespoke scripted plug-in, which allowed for the triangle panels to unfold from one another. The use of animated gradients mapped onto the eagle meant we could control how and where the model was built and to the correct timing. This process required both the scripting and animation department to work together to create a controllable and flexible solution, which could then be tweaked if necessary.

In the later stages of production, we applied hi-res materials and studio lighting giving the eagle those extra touches that made it truly stand out. Our rendering method ensured the compositor had enough information and data to bring out the finer details, whilst also putting the finishing touches on the animation.

PROJECT TITLE: Horse
CLIENT: Pharmaceutical Brand
AGENCY: GSW Worldwide
CREATIVE DIRECTION: Taylor James
CGI & POST PRODUCTION: Taylor James
COMPLETE PRODUCTION: Taylor James

GSW Worldwide Horse from Taylor James on Vimeo.