[PRESS RELEASE FROM DIGITAL PICTURES]
In a new Spring Valley juice campaign created by George Pattersons Y & R, animated characters called Sensibles, draw a visual analogy to the state of one’s inner health. The team at Digital Pictures Melbourne worked together to produce the online 3D characters in a world first using realtime Flash Papervision3D.
DPM interactive programmer Clint Hannaford explains: “We’ve taken a file format originally created for first person shooter video games from 10 years ago (id Softwares Quake 2) and used it to push real-time character animation to Flash via the Papervision3D technology”.
A Sensible is a comical character that is the physical embodiment of your “sensible” side and wants nothing more than for you to look after yourself by making sensible dietary choices, such as the Spring Valley range of products. The technique used to animate the character online works extremely well to portray its changing mood and emotions dependant on its treatment.
Clint continues, “Extending on the work of the Papervision3D team and contributors such as Philippe Ajouxe, we’ve managed to create a fluid and interactive character animation engine, and combined it with some basic AI (Artificial Intelligence) to bring the Sensibles to life.”
In addition to Clint’s work Digital Pictures Melbourne drew on expertise from across it’s businesses to also completed the animation, character sounds, post production and Flash programming for client GPY&R.
Flagstaff sound producer Ceri Davies commented “From a creative perspective, we got to make some really great SFX by slapping around some meat off-cuts we bought from the butcher……mmmmm squishy……but the best part of Sensibles from a technical point of view, was that we were able to work across three mediums (interactive site, TVC and radio) and deal with the differences in sound mixing that these formats all require”.
Iloura animator Chris Gray agreed that the unique cross format application was an interesting first, “Cool jobs like this don’t come along often and it was an exciting challenge, working on both the TVC’s and the interactive elements of a campaign that is so left of centre.”
The campaign launches across TV, web (including a clever Facebook application) and print platforms in August.