I was commissioned by Aescripts to make a promotional video for the After Effects plugin Fast Bokeh Pro. It has been one of the most succesful commercial projects I've made since I'm freelancing. I had a lot of creativity freedom within the idea, art direction and animation style. I'm really happy with the result! Sound design by Jeremy Sollod.
The original brief was to make a video that showed a character sad because the video hasn't any depth of field on it and everything looked flat. Then the plugin Fast Bokeh Pro turned on and the character would turn happy because the scene suddenly looked prettier because of the depth of field. I tought on adding some narrative sense to that idea and make a meta story with it.
So I presented the Amateur Photographer character. Following the script provided, this guy would try to capture his best shot, but he couldn't get happy with any of them until the plugin drops into scene.
I'm getting a lot into stylize real world objects into it's minimal expression. I wanted to work both character and environment over this concept. Making the overall look simple while recognisible as real world objects.
Since this piece would have a humourous background, character design would play a powerful part on this. Making a character with goofy proportions, such as big feet and small head, and wearing clothes that would his mom picked for him. All this details would make us to feel tender for him.
Also, I wanted to make the character not relatable to any race, just to be a simple human being, using a white skin, without any skin tone, freckless or spots. I always tend to add a lot of details on materials, so it was hard to resist to not add any realistic detail!
Making 2D face expressions also made simpler the proccess of modeling and rigging the character, while getting a looot of expressiveness, flexibility and simplicity.
Animation style would need to be quite simple, just as the overall piece. Focusing on making easy to read poses with a pose-to-pose animation with quick in between poses, feeling the character energy and animical state. Croasan helped me a lot on this part, don't forget to check his work!
Original script included a lot of text that needed to be read in someway, in order to explain the plugin. I wanted to make a brutalist design on it, that would cause impact on the viewer, with emphasis in the important concepts.