For this project i am going to make a 10-15 second tv bumper advert for Wham Storage Boxes (the uk's largest manufacturer and brand leader of plastic housewares, gardening and storage products.
I need to create a bumper that promotes and uses the wham storage boxes in a playful and expressive manner, with the aim of increasing the audiences intrigue and awareness of wham storage boxes. The final outcome i create can be made using any medium e.g. 3d stop motion 2d etc.
Target Audience:
young professionals first time property buyers aged 25-35 years old
Range of products examples:
i searched on the plastic storage boxes website to find out the range of wham storage boxes offered and what they look like aesthetically wise and structure to help me think about how i could use these in my animation
This image show the 6 main colours they use for their products
Examples of their main colour uses (clear plastic with coloured lid)
Usually it seems they only place the colour on the lid of the products for their boxes however they do have a small selection of boxes that are completely coloured
Boxes in the home environment and in use.
products with wheels for easier transportation
stationary product containers
Al the variety of home storage box's the company supplies (not including the school, craft and industry box's tabs that also have their own massive selection of different style box's)
Example work i have managed to find that could help inspire my idea development and relates to this project or my ideas for the advert in some way .
This is an advert for dioxin storage solutions and so related closely to the type of advert i am creating for wham storage boxes however this company does focus on industrial storage and so the visual outcome due to target audience will be slightly different. However the fact that they have used a clean white background is somthing i could consider for my own work as it suggests organisation and cleanliness reflecting how the product will help with the buyers environment. also the organisation and stacking style transition of the rows of storage units falling into place works well as the movement reflects the nature of the product and also again has an organised satisfying tetris style or jigsaw puzzle style visuals of fitting all the pieces into their rightful place.
I liked this advert as it is a bit more playful and as the target audience for the wham storage box advert is young adult a more playful nature is probably a good way to grasp their attention and relate to the audience. the visuals relate to the narrative and are playful and lively however the overall appearance has been kept simple and not too distracting by keeping minimalist colour and not having too manny elements on the screen at one time.
I liked this advert as it is short and the advert i need to create has to be between 10-15 seconds so this video gives be a good idea of how long my advert should go on for and how things look within that amount of time (need to be cut down etc). also again its simple and to the point this is probably necessary due to the amount of time i have to create my advert.
Fragile - Please Handle With Care from Hal Hex on Vimeo.
I don't think this video is an advert of any kind however i liked the aesthetics movement and general idea behind it as inspiration for my work as the wham storage boxes slot into each other and stack onto of each other and so i could create some kind of Russian doll transition or stacking animation similar to this piece for my work. I also think that the plain white background with a slight glow of colour so that it doesn't look too artificial works well as this element of warm colour could reflect the warmth of a home while still displaying that overall clean and organised visual effect of the environment.
One of my brainstorm ideas was the idea of using the space inside and around the boxes to add text this video shows how i could do this in interesting ways if i decide to take this idea further.
Fun With Text Animation from Justin Poore on Vimeo.
Collaboration: Dolls House Inside Box:
After discussing our ideas as a group me and hannah decided to pair up in order to get the ideas we had discussed with each other that we liked done in the amount of time we have available.
One of hannah's brainstorming ideas was to use a dolls house rooms as segments in a wham storage box like this one. And to have the segments inside a box.
Mock up image of this idea (after looking at the variation of wham storage boxes we decide the segments box is best for this idea as the rooms can go inside the segments):
My original idea was to use text by having various words placed inside different boxes such as 'organise your living space' etc and to have a box lid created in cinema 4d close on the last box as i wanted to experiment more with this program after my last project which i enjoyed working in C4D .
After discussing as a group our ideas mine and hannah ideas were fairly similar however her idea was to have a dolls house inside the box instead of my idea to have words in side the box (as she has a dolls house to use for this) so we decided to pair up and combine ideas in order to get the project done in better time and we have worked together in the past and teamed up well.
Dolls house rooms we will be working with:
This is the dolls house we have to work with. Our idea is to record the rooms in some form and place them inside the segments of a wham storage box (like shows in the mock up image above) and then have the lid close over the rooms to symbolise how the storage boxes can organise all aspects of the home.
We want to have some animation happening within each of the individual dolls house rooms also in order to give the audience a bit more to look at and o create more of a message through metaphor, so we decided that potentially stop motion animations within these rooms using the dolls house furniture could be a good way to do this. We thought that maybe showing untidy rooms animating themselves cleaner would be a good way to do this (the message being that wham storage boxes make your life easier as if the house tidy its self, as people can just shove things in the boxes and have them out the way.)
We decided it could be a nice idea to add some text inside the window frames of the storage box to amplify this message and to add more interest to the animation as with the dolls house being used there is not a whole lot of animation we can do with it.
Slogans we have thought of adding:
Organise your living
Love your home
More space to live
organisation made easy
Storage for your entire home (box has whole house inside it)
Organisation for all your home
storage for all your living
storage for all your home
Organisation for the home you love
organisation for all your home
more space to live
(we might adapt the logos slogan at the end to better reflect the nature and visual representation of our idea).
I had one of the boxes we are using as reference to look at and to model from in cinema 4d so when i was creating it virtually i could compare sizes in relation to each other and spacing and create a more accurate model then if it was off the top of my head. We chose this box as it has the segments in it that we need for the dolls house rooms walls and it fairly close to the internal shape of the dolls house:
We are going to change the number of slots that are inside this box however to match the number of dolls rooms that we have to work with which is 4:
We tested our idea using story board images hannah drew to represent the dolls rooms. Using after effects i made this mock up storage box with the rooms inside it and tested what the animation would look like with words showing inside the box and with jumbling black out windows randomly revealing each room (this animation is supposed to symbolise the actual footage of a real dolls house we are going to use and a cinema 4d model of the box i am going to create):
Even though this is just a rough mock up of this idea after seeing the visual effect of this initial idea we had we did not like the results. It looks too disorganised and confusing and we are unsure of weather the text over each of the rooms is needed as especially when this is real footage of the dolls house the contrast of digital 2d text may look unsatisfying and take the charm away from the dolls house.
This mock up shows how this idea would look with the lid closing over it. However we are thinking of changing the black out windows and text idea.
I Found some interesting dolls house related videos that could help inspire our idea further or help with inspiration on filming the dolls house:
The Dolls House Emporium Interactive Dolls-eye Tour from DNA Advertising on Vimeo.
Although this video is a virtual 3d model of a dolls house and so would be easier to move around inside of i think it is quite nice how it shows shots of the whole rooms and then close up movements and shots within and inside the rooms to highlight all the intricate details within such as the cutlery etc. I think when we come to filming the dolls house ourselves this is something we should think about doing if we can find a way of doing it, with regards to the size of the camera vs the size of the tiny rooms and being able to get far enough inside to get nice shots like this. However the camera zoom could help us with this problem.
Doll House from Louisa Gregory on Vimeo.
This video shows a similar idea to what we are planning on doing for our animation as it is organising and arranging itself through the means of stop motion. The effect of the house becoming more aesthetically pleasing looks good and has a message behind it in a way and if we adapted this idea slightly i think we could create an effective animation while staying relevant to the meaning of wham and get the message of wham storage boxes helping organise homes and making keeping the house tidy easier across to the viewer.
Doll House from Anton Mishenin on Vimeo.
I really liked this piece as a reference with regards to when we come to filming the dolls house as i like house the lighting in the rooms makes the shots look real time and not just photographic. This made me think that we could do something similar to this in our work as although we will be filming in stop motion animation (and this would be too hard to do with stop motion) we could end on a farm that we then film real time from and use lighting to recreate this light effect. So potentially lighting equipment is something we need to consider when filming.
IKEA "Doll House" from Debra Khoo on Vimeo.
This advert for ikea shows again a similar idea to what we are doing as they are adding filmed footage inside another element (like how we will be filming the dolls house separately then adding inside the storage box). The camera angles in this are something we should consider as the footage does not actually exist inside this dolls house you can see how the creators of this video have solved this zooming problem by only zooming so far then cutting into the footage of the woman. When filming the dolls house we will probably have to keep our camera angle dead on straight forward so that when it is inside the box model we make you cannot tell it has been filmed separately.
After deciding we didn't like the idea of having text digitally placed over the rooms (or the black windows which we have decided not to do anymore). We thought one way of solving this problem but still having the text to back up our theme and idea of using the dolls house, would be to create physical text and place it inside the dolls house for example we could make the words out of little cushion shapes or out of lace etc and this way it would match the vintage and physical appearance of the dolls house and look more in keeping.
Testing ideas for making the small furniture style words to be physically placed inside the dolls house to present the message we want to portray. (stemming from the original idea of having text over the shots of the dolls house digitally.
This is a font i found that creates Lacey/ doily style fonts that could potential be placed inside the dolls house and made to look like cushions or wall hangings etc (but placed somewhere readable obviously).
Various different designs and sizes i am going to print these out for use to see how they look within the dolls house:
I also made a new animatic of how our idea will look as we have decided to do close up shots of three of the rooms and cut to each of these shots before cutting out and showing the rooms inside the box as this creates more of a reveal and therefore novelty to the viewer while also addressing the camera angle issues (as some angles will give away the fact that the footage is not actually inside the box, for example we couldn't just zoom out of a room to then show all the rooms in the box as the box is virtual and the dolls house is actually in a real environment):
This also gives us a rough idea of timing for each of our shots:
We made a time table of tasks we want to achieve within a certain time frame in order to organise our time well:
Making The Virtual Model Of The storage Box (C4D):
MEASUREMENTS OF THE DOLLS HOUSE:
Using these measurements i used a square shape to make the shape of the outside of the box and extruded the object to make it hollow. I then used other squares to measure out the size of each of the rooms by adjusting their object property settings and then used the knife tool to add points to the main outside box square and make the walls in these places.
I then made one of the hinges using cylinders and changing points on parts of the cylinder shape on the outside of the box to make the rectangular shaped piece of plastic attached to the hinge by deforming it.
I moved some of the point i have shown in this screen shot on the bottom left window of the screen shot. I have shown how i have moved the points in the circle and dragged them gradually further down to morph the shape of the cylinder into the shape the plastic for the hinge needs to be.
I then made the lid for the box using another cube and adjusting it and bevelling the edges
This is what the flap looked like:
I places all the objects including the hinge sleeve objects into one group so that when the lid moved the sleeves moved with it as this is how the real box moves:
This screen shot shows the sleeves (these are connected to the lid of the box and move with the lid when it moves but they move round the hinge cylinders that they are holding as they move:
This is the hinge cylinders that the sleeves hold (these are not part of the lid group i have made and so when i come to animate the lid this part of the box will stay still.
the highlighted sections shows all the lid objects inside the group
and how they all move together when i rotate the lid (i also had to change pivot points of some of the objects so it rotates from its hinge edge).
These screen shots show how the sleeves move with the lid:
I used this image of the wham logo :
And i then made it an outline in adobe illustrator :
And opened the illustrator file in cinema 4d and then extruded the outline and added a bevel
to make it 3d:
I then started to add the textures and colours to the box and place this logo on the front of the boxes lid:
This is what the logo looks like placed onto the box with the textures:
I made the logo the same texture as the rim which is a slightly frosted less see through texture to the main lid (i did this by adding noise and bump to the texture).
With a different background and with the dolls house footage inside each of these segment windows this is how the ending of our bumper advert is going to look with the cut out to this angled shot showing all the rooms inside the box:
And then the box lid closing over the dolls rooms keeping them inside (and with the see through lid the viewers will still be able to see them inside the box):
This video shows how i made the rotation point to match where the lid needed to open from during the modelling stage of making the box and how the sleeves of the hinges move with it:
We used a camera stand when taking the stop motion images of each of the rooms as we had to try and get each of the shots in the exact same position so that only the objects we were moving appeared to move on screen.
Moving objects inside the room:
Hannah was in charge of the set design when we were doing this and i was the eyes of the camera for her telling her what looked good in screen and what seemed to work (this was more important for when we were trying of techniques for the lighting as hannah could not see infant of the dolls house as she had to go behind it to light through the windows so i had to tell her where to move etc).
Inspired by the research video i showed early on in my project as inspiration (Doll House from Anton Mishenin on Vimeo), i decided we could maybe experiment with trying to create some interesting light movement within our dolls house to record when we were shooting and so i brought some lights i have to try and see if we could create something similar (through the windows perhaps as like a reflectance of sun or car lights etc):
This shows how we tested using the lights behind the windows of the dolls house.
Another example of how we used lighting through the window:
I put together some of the shots we got and made this short animatic out of the stop motion photographs combines with video footage of the room. The idea behind attempting to combine the stop mo photos with the live footage is to make the whole thing seem more like real time as the last shot then shows light moving through the windows in real time.
The footage at the beginning of this animatic is just to set the scene and add to the overall aesthetics:
After creating this it is clear that we can not do this for each of the rooms (or even one of the rooms) in order to create a bumper that only lasts 10-15 seconds overall. For the rooms we will probably just show the room messy and then stop motion 1 frame to the next image of the room clean with the sound of a click sound (the sound the box makes) this gets the message of the advert across quickly and relates to the product (through the use of sound). on the clean shot we could use live footage just to show a bit of light movement so that it looks nice and adds more to look at.
(the lighting we used at the end of this video is an example of how we experimented with the lights we had to try and recreate some of the interesting light movement in the Doll House from Anton Mishenin on Vimeo video that i found.
We also noticed in some of the shots we got from our first shoots that the mirrors in the dolls house have picked up on our reflection and you can see us moving inside the mirrors. This is something we need to check up on in our next shoot.
For the final scene of the whole house, we had to create a make shift stand for the camera as environment the dolls house was in stopped us from being able to place the camera stand the in position we needed as there was furniture in the way. This meant getting a steady shot was harder:
More research videos that relate to our project idea (showing how our work could have been nice having been able to use real studio sets and actors):
For the final scene of our animation (when the box lid closes over the shot of all the dolls house rooms) I removed some of the model i had created (of the inside of the box and the back of it) so that i was left with just the rim of the box and the lid. This is so that when the images of the dolls house were added the rest of the box would not be seen, to make it look as though the depth of the rooms in the picture were the depth of the box and not just as though they were a picture placed inside the box.
I then tested the effect of this in after effects after rendering the shots of the box out in alpha pathways in order to create masks in areas where the picture would go and over the lid so the lid appeared transparent.
These are the png photographs i rendered out using the pathways masks so that the lid is transparent with no background and nothing inside the rim of the box as we will add our own background and add the dolls house footage inside the rim.
These are the results when i added the shots of the whole dolls house inside the masks and a background to give an example of how it will look:
Ideally the main this idea would have been good if we had the resources and time to film real rooms in studio sets with actors moving inside the rooms as the rooms get tidy to really get the message and idea of our advert idea across however we had to work with what we had and went with the symbolic use of a dolls house to represent the home environment and therefore connect to the home owners in this way and show how wham storages boxes can help their own homes too.
I use pose morph tool to make the latch of the box click outwards when the lid closes as this added slightly to the visuals even though the box is from a front view angle i keyframes when i wanted the morph to happen:
Bedroom One Scene:
This is a quick video i made to show the before stage of the stop motion for the main bedroom we were using. some of the lighting changed when we were recording the rooms for our stop motion and there must have been some slight camera movements also when we were taking the pictures of the room as this is the sequence of footage we need for the room however it does need editing slightly as you can see colour changes and position changes as the clip goes on and it doesn't look as good as it could do.
This shows how this sequence is going to progress though (with the stop motion of the room getting clean and the live footage of the light moving across the room at the end both easing into each other so they look like they are all one piece).
In this version for the bedroom one scene i have editing the colour of individual picture in the stop motion sequence and the colours of the footage of the light movement of the end to make them look like the same shot with just the furniture moving.I also adjusted the position for each of the shots so that the furniture that wasn't moving in each of the pictures was lined up and the only movement was the moving furniture, i did this by making one picture slightly more opaque and then lining another picture up with the stationary furniture. It makes it look more tidy and exaggerates the furniture movement more as there are less distractions from light and movement changes other than the furniture itself.
Bedroom Two:
This video shows the stop motion sequence i made after editing the individual pictures :
This was the rough version before the editing:
Living Room:
This is the sequence for the living room after editing it:
And this is the sequence of the footage before editing it:
This sequence before editing has lots of lighting and colour changing between each of the pictures for the sequence that can been seen more clearly when in this animated sequence.
Testing visuals:
When deciding on how to make each of these scenes for our animation look i decided to test weather using two pieces of video footage together would look good (where the messy room cuts to a shot of the clean room to show the transition) as this would make a more real time looking sequence and we could show the lighting techniques we tested in these:
we decided to go with the photograph stop motion sequences as they have more of a magical feel to them and more upbeat and fun visual appearance with a lively personality which is the atmosphere we want to create to the audience, that using wham storage boxes is so easy its like magic and to connect to a younger audience with the fun lively movements of the piece creating a positive easy and even fun feel towards the product.
This is the animation of the lid closing i made with the alpha paths ways and no background added (the pathways mean that there are make that have removed the inside of the box rim and the background from the cinema 4d program and so we can add our own.
This is the original logo we had to work with, with the slogan organised living that wham has underneath the logo:
I discussed earlier in this post about how we had been coming up with new slogans to better represent and push the themes and idea behind our work in this project and hannah made some versions of this logo with the new slogans:
We liked the slogans that spoke directly to the viewer e.g. storage for all your home as that connect more to the viewer and makes in more relevant to each individual viewers life and needs etc.
Sound:
We decided to use this song we found on youtube for the main song in our animation as it is upbeat and lively to reflect the fun nature of the advert we have made however still has a classical feel to it and reflects the nature of the dolls house's slightly more classical styled interior and origins.
we found that the beat in this song as well goes in time with the motions in the stop motion rooms sequence at the beginning and so works well without too much editing of the sound. The fact that this song is made from just instruments and with no modern computerised synth sounds or digitals inputs makes the song better suited to the visual style of the classical dolls house rooms which are slightly outdated in appearance but resemble a charming quality about them.
Before we decided on this one we looked at other uplifting and positive background tunes however they all seemed a bit too modern and computerised to be in keeping with the style and visuals of the direction our work had gone in and so it did not suit well:
we also considered adding foley sound or ambient sound of the house hold dwellers such as laughing children or families chatting etc. However with the use of a dolls house who's style is more classical and with the dolls house being animated with furniture moving on its own we thought this created more of a spooky or haunted feel to the footage.
This was another families sound effects video we found to consider however again it did not work the way we had considered that it might and we decided to not use any sounds of family life or children laughing etc:
BackGround Testing:
For this last scene where the box lid closes over the dolls house inside the box we need a background to go behind it to compliment it. The use of some kind of hoomely looking texture could be a good idea like a carpet texture or a wooden floor texture as it reinforces the storage for your home message and shows the box present within the home.
(shot from the last scene so far)
Experimenting with various textures and colours to decide which looks best:
Purple carpets to reflect and go with the colour of the box however this colour maybe takes away from the colour of the rim of the box.
I made more muted toned colours for the carpet to look more realistic and emphasise the warm glow lighting within the box.
I also experimented with a background that makes the box look upright by using a skirting board background that i used the clone tool with to make it a corner of a room so that there was not too much distraction in the background.
(as the box show the rooms upright but inside it the other textures make it look like the world inside the box is on it back and defying gravity slightly).
I then tried a slightly more abstract texture of tissue paper as this could suggest that the box is not on a floor and just infant of a texture (people associate carpets with the floor which is why it had this effect with the carpet textures) and experimented with colours to compliment the worldd inside the box.
I used two tones in this texture with the lighter fliecks of colour resembling and highlighting the flecks of light within the dolls house room.
We then adjusted the individual scenes of each of the dolls rooms so that the colours were similar and looked more connected. And added the background music to match the movements of the stop motion and lid closing with the beats and the rhythms of the music.
Final versions with different textures behind the box at the end. I will experiment with this version more before we take our work into show holders as i ran out of time with the project deadline and there are still things i want to alter.
This is the making of video for the box, hannah did most of the work on this as when we were organising our time schedule i was editing the stop motion footage and finalising the box lid animation when hannah started on the making of. We have shown the stages we went through with each section of the animation and used shots to show how we achieved each of these things along with our research and development and visualisation of our idea development. The music we used again is similar style to the music to the main piece to connect them however its slightly different to show that it is still separate from the main animation. This is something i have been doing in all my recent making of videos, swell as focusing more on the transitioning and aesthetics of the making of videos so that they look equally as interesting as the main.
