Every year Greater Reading Economic Partnership puts out an ad focusing on the promotion of businesses within the Reading area. Choosing one successful business each year, this year they chose Cambridge Lee. Cambridge Lee is a copper tubing manufacturer who, due to Reading’s great business environment, is now able to compete in the global market. Going international is a huge milestone for any company and by highlighting this in an ad it would certainly reel in new business owners and entrepreneurs for Greater Reading.
My main challenge was to make copper tubing interesting, and have it work together with the chosen copy of the ad, rather than just sit there. After playing around with the idea of stock photography I decided to do something alot more exciting and more symbolic of the message Greater Reading Economic Partnership was trying to convey.
During any downtime I had while at my Internship, I watched videos on how to use Maxon Cinema 4D. Basically, for those who are unfamiliar with the program, Cinema 4D is a very powerful 3D modeling, rendering, and animation tool that can generate imagery useful in almost any application. After seeing so many beautiful projects here on Behance that used the software, I just had to learn how, and what better way to learn something than to apply it to something "you need to do" (ie this GREP ad).
After finding 3 different open-source models of earth made in Cinema 4D, I used texture combinations from each one and created my 3d earth. Then using the Cinema 4Ds material editor I then fine tuned my copper textures. For the ocean I choose a more brushed copper look and the continents a very reflective copper. This way the copper tubes growing out from the Reading area would reflect on the continent's surface.
Of course, choose a sexy angle and do the final render which will be dropped into Photoshop, then later Indesign.
The client was very pleased with the finished product, and the ad was resized for serveral different local publications.
I even adapted it to a web-banner format for the Greater Reading homepage.
