Affinity Steel Super Bowl Ads (2023)
Ad 1 (30 seconds)
Ad 2 (30 Seconds)
Bison Original Render/Composite Deliverable -- This is a direct render from the After Effects file I made for the client, to be further edited/color corrected by them.
Buck Original Render/Composite Deliverable -- This is a direct render from the After Effects file I made for the client, to be further edited/color corrected by them. In the final, the squirrel was not used, but I like the interaction here.
Buck Original Render/Composite Deliverable -- This is a direct render from the After Effects file I made for the client, to be further edited/color corrected by them. In the final, the squirrel was not used, but I like his effort to back up the Buck.
Late in 2022, I was privileged to be included on an awesome team, where I worked on a local ad that aired during the Super Bowl in 2023 in Midway, Texas, USA. The supervising company which was contracted by Affinity Steel is Hamil Bros Studios (www.hamilbrosstudios.com), who contracted Anomaly Video (www.anomalyvideo.com) to do the visual effects. I was subcontracted, in turn, to provide the final animated deliverables for the project.
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My responsibilities on this project included: Modeling, lighting, texturing, some fur grooming, rig editing, setting up shape keys, character animation and rendering/compositing to live action plates. All the animals were either purchased off of Turbo Squid or were created by a talented modeler named Helmut Schulz (www.thalion-graphics.de). I did some tweaking of fur shaders and fur simulation. Facial animation was captured via mocap in iClone 7, and then I used iClone 8 to export to Blender, where the facial mocaps were integrated (with some cleaning up) onto the animals. All facial animation was captured by Zachary Hendrix, an extremely talented voice actor in his own right, and I then set up the rigged animals with shape-keys to port the facial mocap to the animals.
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All 6 characters were animated based off of the voice actors' tracks, with each animal having specific personality and weighting. For example, the Bison's head is big and heavy, whereas the Squirrel is jerky and spastic.
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HDRIs captured on set were used for basic lighting, with scene lighting augmented in Blender. Shadows were added using shadow catcher meshes to simulate real-world shadows, and were used the marry the live action and CG elements.
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Very proud of the work we accomplished as a team, and the contribution I was able to make to the success of the project.
