"These look AMAZING! Wow, really happy with them. I really am blown away by the quality. Thank you so much."
Christian McGilloway, Chief Technical Innovation Officer
Retail Zoo
3D character takes over Boost Juice store
When the famous Boost Juice group of stores (founded by Shark Tank’s Janine Allis) came knocking with a brief to do some animation, we sharpened our pencils* and prepared for some fun and games.
This was the plot. Retail Zoo’s (the holding company) in-house team had already prepared some collateral which we were to support with a couple of 15-second pre-rolls.
Their scripts involved a “nutty” peanut taking over the store at night and spray painting over in-store posters. Sure – happens all the time.
We’d worked with the Retail Zoo’s team before, for the launch of their Protein Balls, so we knew they liked things edgy.
Partway through the project, our animation team decided they needed to use more 3D than was originally planned to achieve the look they wanted, so they rolled up their sleeves and gave it the full treatment.
They’ve notched up over 365,000 views on YouTube so far. Not bad. Check out the second of the two below:
Styles/techniques
*This just in. We really do still use pencils. Animators Rich and Oz worked on the character development of the star Peanut in this ad. In pencil! By hand!
The character went through a few personality and visual iterations before he was approved. A great character is like a great actor - they take your work to another level.
He was then developed and animated in Blender. The backdrops and lighting were done in Cinema 4D and we built the store set in 3D from reference photos supplied by the client.
CD comments
“It was interesting to see the character change and develop,” animator Jordan Booker commented. “He had to be naughty but likeable.”
A last-minute change in the audio presented another challenge.
“We had to re-animate the mouth to sync and then re-render… on the due date. No pressure...”
