Virgin Active - Summer '24 Campaign

Virgin Active campaign key visual featuring 3D models of summer and gym themed elements.

T H E B R I E F

With their upcoming Summer Campaign, Virgin Active South Africa asked us for some assistance with design and animation of graphic elements to make use of across the campaign. A lovely brief that involved building assets whilst their production house defined the storyboards for each of our back plates.

As always, our first step was defining our creative inspiration with their Virgin Active's Direction, and finding placeholder imagery to use in the early stages of creative output.

T A S K 0 1 - A S S E T C R E A T I O N

3D Elements

Using a mixture of built and sourced topology, most of our focus went into shader creation, rigging and animation. Our main goals were to keep our colour palette in check, whilst maintaining a surrealism of finish to prevent the elements from ever feeling too realistic in nature.

T A S K 0 2 - C O N C E P T S

Layout Exploration

With the early phases of production came creative freedom to explore a wide range of treatments. Originally our live action content was going to be a set of black and white photography. But, as the brief progressed, we soon realised that we would be working with colour, footage plates.

T A S K 0 3 - A N I M A T I ON

Typography

The mix of hand-drawn and inflated type meant animation would be done in both Cinema 4D and Adobe After Effects. Our "Shine" messaging also need a touch of self-collision to help bank the puffiness of its inflation.

3D Elements

As for the 3D objects, once we had approval on our compositions, we went about rolling out three variations of object selections and placements, all built around a placeholder humanoid. Simple key-frame based animation within Cinema 4D.

Crop Tests

Getting an accurate indication of framing was a key piece of the production puzzle and to build layouts and animations, before the actual shoot day, meant that we needed to come up with a time efficient way of generating framing guides.

We made use of Midjourney to help create location and subject specific imagery with which we could build accurate compositions for client approval and shoot guidance. A bit of a "cart before the horse" situation. But, with timings being so tight, we had to be proactive.

T A S K 0 4 - P O S T P R O D U C T I O N

Tracking

When we did finally get our hands on the final footage, we needed to do some basic 3D tracks to cater for the hand held cinematography and 2D crown element placements.

Rotoscope

Along with our tracking, each plate needed around 125 frames worth of rotoscoping. Tedious, but fundamental for our render placements.

T A S K 0 5 - R E N D E R S

Final Executions

Our final, rendered sequences were shipped off to the post production company, who was responsible for grading the final footage plates, and dropping in our tracked, and rotoscoped sequences.