Commercial ID’s

Screen Shot007Here’s a bunch of ID’s we made at Astral Media, a big television company in Canada, for Vrak.TV, a very popular channel for teenagers here in Quebec. We modeled, animated, and textured all the paper, frame by frame, using Blender.

We then made the compositing in AfterEffects, adding the many render layers over backgrounds we shot.

Hope you guys like it!

ID Vrak.TV from Nicolas Ménard on Vimeo.

Credits

Client: Astral Media / Chaines Télé Astral

2D/3D animation, photos: Maxime Dussault, Nicolas Ménard

Realisators: Raphël Bélanger et Fred Dompierre

Director of postproduction: Marcuse Olivier

Compositing: Marc-André Lavoie

Sound: Bernard Poirier

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  • http://dsgn.pw-software.com Nokadota

    That’s some nice stuff! Quite humorous as well, great work.

  • johnj

    i’ve never seen a thing like that; good ideas!

  • Dimetrii

    Cool. Like.

  • Jean_R

    En un mot, “super-boulot” !

  • damir

    Tis is combination of stop and 3d animation? Nice idea.

  • http://www.skol.ch/o oenvoyage

    Very nice work!
    Stop motion in 3D :)
    I love your other works too
    Très bonne idée et réalisation.

  • Zecc

    Not being in the biz, I don’t know what “ID” means, but I like to believe it is pronounced like “idée”.

  • Jahmaica

    wow! really nice =D

  • http://www.epanimation.com.ar martin eschoyez

    really great work. Submit it here http://www.stashmedia.tv/
    to see more Blender on the pro league. ;)

  • Nixon

    great use of blender:)
    good compositing too looks very fresh..thumbs up

    @Zecc
    i think the ID stands for identity/ identification…usually tv stations would use them as jingles between stuff and that the viewer can identify the station they are on…just guessing here tho

  • http://www.virgiliovasconcelos.com Virgilio Vasconcelos

    Great work. Really love the visuals! :)

    Congrats!

  • Rob Cozzens

    Wow. Looks cool, but it seems like it would have been just as much work as real stop motion.

  • Nicolas Ménard

    Thanks for the nice comments guys!

    To answer a few questions:
    -ID stands for Identities, Nixon was right in his definition of the term!
    -We could have made the same thing in real stop-motion, but in television work, we need to have the optimal versatilty over our projects, so if there’s modifications to do, we don’t have to do it all over again. So that’s why we used blender to do it!

  • Bastian

    Totally crazy! Love it!

  • http://lasserb.dk Lasphere

    WOW that was cool!

  • Born

    Fascinating!

  • moongold

    Inspiration must surely have been ‘Fast Film’ by Virgil Widrich
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Td6UObEEaQQ

    Get it on onedotzero no.4 – all their productions are full of quality work.
    http://www.onedotzero.com/dvd.php?id=2810308

    Doesn’t take away from the quality of that Blender work though, awesome :-)

  • comeinandburn

    I work for a small digital channel in Toronto, Canada and I’ve been steadily integrating blender into my workflow over the last couple of years.

    I don’t have anything this extensive, usually just logos and 3d text integrated with motion graphics, but I use it where I can. I’m glad to see that there are others out there that are doing the same. Blender is such a great example of what can be accomplished by a community.

    What did you use for 3d motion tracking?

    Merci pour partager! (I think that’s correct)

  • http://www.rgbk.org Wray Bowling

    I can’t help but wonder if the pieces of paper had bones, or if it was just a lot of shape keys.

  • Gryphon

    If it hadn’t been posted on BN, I never would have known it wasn’t just stop motion. This is great.

  • Joel F

    @Wray Bowling: Probably bones. Shape keys only translate vertexes in a straight line from one position to another, whereas bones would allow you to rotate parts of the mesh (like when the paper is folding).

    Some of the crinkling and folding I would guess was done with animated displacement texture or lattice, perhaps? There’s a part I noticed with several sawtooth shaped crinkles ‘traveling’ down the paper. Bones wouldn’t be the first thing I’d try for accomplishing that bit.

    @Rob Cozzens: With the added complication of video frames on the paper, stop-motion animation of printed frames might actually be harder.

  • Nicolas Ménard

    Hey guys,

    to answer some technical questions: the process was quite simple. No bones, no shape keys.

    We simply modeled a paper shape, applied a video texture to it, and duplicated the same shape for each frame, modifying frame by frame the position of the flaps.

    Once the low poly animation was done, we subdivided each frame and used the sculpt tool to quickly add details to the paper shape, so it’s different each frame, to keep the stop-motion look of real paper.

    We worked in 15 frames by second.
    Also we didn’t use any 3D tracker, just our eyes, ahah. For the boat, for exemple, it was tracked in Blender frame by frame with a plane I used as a guide. So after sculpting a frame, I placed the plane so the perspective match the position of the boat.

    Hope it helps!

  • Zecc

    @Nixon: Thanks for your answer.

    @Nicholas: I suppose I would have modeled each frame individually too, but without a camera tracker behind? Not so sure…
    You did a good job.

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