FRAMESTORE BRING WOOD TO LIFE

FRAMESTORE have announced the completion of a challenging animation project for wood specialists Richard Burbidge.
Framestore were called upon to come up with animated wooden figures, that appeared to be made of real wood, to feature in four spots for their sponsorship of the television programme, 'Our House'.
The concept required caterpillars that transformed into butterflies to illustrate the decorative nature of the Burbidge product – decorated timber.
Directed by Markus Manninen and produced by Helen MacKenzie at FrameStore, a small team of animators set out to make the spots visually interesting and appealing. The brief was to create an outdoor feel, with a clean, simplistic set and some stop-motion within the animation.
The work started in Softimage|3D where Manninen developed all of the pre-visualization and supervised animators, Ulf Lundgren and Kate Hood, in designing, modelling and animating the figures. The agency, BDH\TBWA, had some terrific print work that was used as a basis for the wooden figures, whilst the animation team was also able to get their hands on the physical models used in the print ads. Ulf then went on to develop textures and lighting for the spots.
To enable the real-life lighting and fluent caterpillar animation Ulf worked in Softimage|XSI, using its ‘final gathering’ lighting tool. To get the shadows of the real leaves in naturalistic motion, a tree was filmed with a DV-camera, and used on a shadow casting object in 3D.
Due to the long schedule of the project the compositing of the spots took place in 3D. Ulf layered the spots to enable colour tweaks in Adobe After Effects. Finally, Senior Henry Operator Paul O’Brien added the titles.
(GB)