cgi studio London Essex
The Royal Mint – Forever Metal
cgi studio London Essex
Overview
EveryFriday needed a CGI Studio to help them produce the 3D elements for their campaign with The Royal Mint. Working alongside the directors Alex Burt and Joseph Bull from Unit 9, we had to seamlessly incorporate the CGI animation into the already photographed footage of the Welsh Hills.
The campaign paid tribute to the heritage and significance of gold, showcasing The Royal Mint’s latest effort to recycle the precious metal from recovered tech, appealing to a younger, tech savvy, and environmentally aware audience.
cgi studio London Essex
The motion design needed to reflect these goals and accurately portray the material attribute of gold. The idea was to take a raw element of Gold, and melting it to form a ring, part of the Forever Metal range from The Royal Mint. We were provided footage shot close to The Royal Mint’s home in the rolling Welsh Hills. We would usually like to capture a HDRI of the environment to gain accurate reflections and lighting. However this was not available during the shoot time. We decided to convert the footage into a reflection map and bring this in Cinema 4D. We then replicated the lighting as accurately as possible using an sky HDRI roughly matching the weather conditions at the time. . This allowed us to get accurate reflections, and ground the objects into the environment with the lighting.
Under the direction of EveryFriday we created a bespoke, elevated feel that fits at home within The Royal Mint’s existing branding. By using wide cinematic shots, slow zooms and real natural lighting.
cgi studio London Essex
Process
The initial setup for our animation used xParticles within Cinema 4D. We decided to create a liquid simulation that could flow and blob around in a natural way. However we found that motion was not feeling right, we could not achieve a smooth flowing animation to create the ring shape. The liquid would not separate and would keep connecting in the middle of the ring.
We decided to go back to the drawing board and opted to use a different technique. We still needed a way to create an object that flowed like a liquid, but was much more controllable. We settled on using the volume builder in Cinema 4D, alongside a MoGraph particle set up. This allowed us finer control over each particle, and a flowing volume we could change into whatever shape we wanted. We could also bring in modeled elements to boole the lettering away from the ring shape. The technique was similar to using particles, but with a greater control for animation over simulation, allowing for more defined art direction.
We rendered using Redshift, working with 32 bit EXRs in ACES colour profile. This allows us the greatest control of the render when compositing the final frames. As we had already received the footage graded by Luke Seomore, it was important that we composite the CGI into the footage seamlessly and match what Luke had done in the grade. We composited our project within Adobe After Effects, making simple tweaks to reflections and specularity of the golds. As incorporating shadows, and reflections into the footage. We subsequently graded the within After Effects too. Simply tweaking the colour to within the same colour ranges and palette used by Luke. Luke was a great help to us here, as he was happy to share his expert opinion on our way and give tweaks where needed.
cgi studio London Essex
Delivery
The project consisted of a hero film showing the transformation from a gold nugget into a desirable ring, and a collection of stills for print. The campaign consists of assets for film, social media, digital advertising and OOH.
On a personal note this was an exciting project to work on, with a heritage brand that has been a part of my life and my families, a UK institution. We are really pleased with the end result, and feel it harnessed our skills as animators and compositors. The campaign was a great success, and worked really well alongside the print campaign. The campaign was featured on The Drum, an honour to see our work there.
cgi studio London Essex
Thank You
Client: The Royal Mint
Agency: EveryFriday
Animation: Ultra Studio
Creative Director: Dan Fernadez
Production Director: Toby Horrocks
Directors: Alex Burt + Joseph Bull (Unit 9)
Grade: Luke Seomore
Output: Film, Social, Print, Digital, OOH
Social Media Animation
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