The Mill+ Creates Comfort Bloom Character Animation

The Blossom spot directed by Mill+ animation director Russell Appleford plays on the theme that royalty is spread by the new Comfort fragrance. The star of the ad, Felicia brings a sunny optimism to the ad by turning everything she touches red and gold from carpet, to palace, to carriage.

The team at the Mill+ carefully crafted each character, with designers and 3D artists working closely with the director throughout the process. This close collaboration enabled the look and feel of each character to be developed and finessed until the very end production phase.

Director Russell Appleford explains how each element was skilfully designed to produce the final look, the key concept when creating Felicia was to give her a look of grace and royalty, this is reflected in her dress of layered silk that emits a colourful trail of fragrance to form the centre piece of the spot.

Appleford continues: We also paid particular attention to creating a traditional soldiers uniform complete with thimble helmet and flowing red braid to accompany the horses which had to strike a balance between being decorative, strong and graceful, yet soft enough for the comfort cloth world.

Using the Palace of Versailles as reference, the animation and design team explored designs to capture the regal grandeur displayed in the spot as well as soften the edges to compliment the Comfort world.

The set of carefully crafter characters and environments are complimented by a royal carriage encrusted with jewels and draped with lace, braids, gold stitching and luxurious satin.

Lead 3D artists Sauce Villas comments, This was an exciting an challenging project for the 3D team to get stuck into. There is an incredible amount of detail in every shot due to the rich variety of characters and transitions each one of them unique in it's performance and environment. We created customized rigs and costumes to transform every character, using Houdini to create the particle effects and the gold dust that drive the transformations.

A number of particle tests were done in order to recreate the shots of the taxi transforming into a royal carriage and motorbikes into horses. The key challenge was to ensure that the particles matched the timing of the animation and that they fit perfectly within the shape of the models. We developed special controls in those models that allowed us to conform their shapes and silhouettes so we could blend them together over a few frames to create the magical transition.

LINK:	http://www.cgw.com/Press-Center/Web-Exclusives/2014/The-Mill-Creates-C...
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