WebMD - Reaction Time 360˚

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WebMD invited us to create another 360 degree video—this one discussing reaction time and how it's impacted by sleep or a lack thereof. The creative brief for this video was pretty wide open, and we're grateful to WebMD's Courtney Dixon and Stephanie Stipes for allowing us to push things visually and for giving us the freedom to explore different technologies and techniques. These projects are so rewarding not just for the technical nature, but because the content tends to focus on medically meaningful ideas and theories that impact us all.

Early Explorations

Early in the process, Nidia Dias and Ryan Butterworth began to explore the visual tone for the film. WebMD wanted to incorporate some of their brand colors and gave us some early web mockups for where the video would live. Given the more negative nature of the topic, the first few styleframes were darker and a bit cloudy. With some feedback from WebMD, who asked that it look less 'scary,' we pulled some purple and blue inspiration and adjusted the styleframes accordingly.

Final Styleframes

As we honed the style further, the cloudy, dark style was replaced with elegant, glowing purples and blues. Next, scenes were boarded out based off the script written by and visual references selected by Clara Lehmann and Jonathan Lacocque.

One scene called for a car crash. It was a creative challenge to make the scene dynamic in 360, and still possible given the project timeline and hardware available. Chris Moberg and Chase Hoch refined our pipeline and some of the 3D settings we were using in Cinema and Octane.

360° Scenes

Adapting the boards to full 360 images was definitely a challenge. We're used to working within a confined HD space where it's easy to hide things like light sources. As a result, we really had to re-think a lot of this video, even as it pertained to making sure the animated sequence matched the approved styleframes. We also made it a mission to use as much of the 360 degree space as possible—exploiting the technology as much as possible without overwhelming the viewer.

Behind The Scenes

Below is a collection of techniques used to create some of the shots!

Brain

We used Cinema 4D's new fields system to drive animated vertex maps (left). These were used to control X-Particle emissions (right) in specific areas of the brain.

For the final effect (below), two X-Particle systems were combined. The pink is the vertex map with particle emissions, and the teal/black is another particle system that takes advantage of X-Particles' follow surface modifier.

Heart

Using a similar technique with C4D's fields and vertex maps (left), we were able to combine that with a displacer deformer to animate the veins of the heart pulsing (right).

We combined the animated vein geometry with a few more X-Particles systems (below) to emphasize the pulsing animation of the heart. Particles are following the surface and emitting from the surface.

TV Cable Management

Here we used Cinema 4D's spline dynamics to organically place the television cables. Because they were dynamic we could easily use a temporary collider object to move the cables around.

Car Crash

We took a few built in models found in Cinema 4D, banged up the fenders, broke the concrete, and cracked the glass. A volumetric fog was used to help set the mood, tell the story, and at the same time allowed for minimal geometry and lighting.

Stairs

Escher inspired labyrinth of stair cases. We used the excellent and easy to use plugin for Cinema 4D Smart Stairs.

Light Tunnel

X-particles came in handy for this scene. We originally used a complex system of cloners and long thin cylinders as our light streaks. Unable to accomplish the smooth color shift throughout the scene, we switched to x-particles, which allowed us to use one system, controlling not only the color of the streak, but the particle count and shape, too.

Hair Tunnel

We used almost a half-million hairs for this car wash tunnel. We attached standard Cinema 4D hairs to a cylinder, which was deformed by the random effector with some turbulence. This setup was surprisingly quick to make changes and iterate.