MY ROLE
Creative Director, Compositor & Motion Designer
INITIAL THOUGHTS
When the studio was presented with the brief for the new Vegemite television commercial with tennis player Ash Barty, it was a little daunting due to the fact that Vegemite is an iconic Australian product. Everyone knows the packaging back to front, how the product should look and all the distinctive colours that make up the brand. So when I began to map out the style frames all of these things were continually playing over in the back of my mind. The upside was that there was a lot of reference to draw on. So if something didn't feel quite right or looked a little out of proportion there was a lot to go back and look at.
Modelling could begin straight away as the packaging was never going to change, so we started by first heading down to the supermarket to pick up a jar to get the dimensions exactly right. This was probably the most important step as it would really influence everything moving forward. The client undoubtedly would pickup if even the slightest ripple in the lid was out of whack or a front face was too long or extruded.
LIGHTING
Once the model had been approved by the Agency and the client, the lighting was the next big task. There were some additional elements that needed carry on over from the print campaign with regards to the back lighting and overlay but I was keen to have a real high end product type feel. The high end studio lighting feel was also enhanced by the really nice texturing and modelling done by Edwina and Courtney in Octane.
COMPOSITING
Once the animation had been signed off, the camera was exported out of Cinema 4D and composited all in Nuke with some additional 2D effects. Multiple passes were also rendered out, including, shadow, reflection, diffuse, motion vectors, z depth and a ton of object buffers to help individually light specific elements within the scene. Initially, I thought we would only need a couple of object buffers but as we pushed further and further through the job it became apparent that the more object buffers we had for labels, glass, toast, spread, background, etc, the more flexibility we had in comp without the need to go back to render. Certain areas on the label needed to brought up in luminance and saturation while some more contrast needed to be pumped in to
the toast and spread too. All little touches used to help enhance the renders.
