Concept work had already been developed by when I joined the project, but there was still everything to do with it, from look dev to final editing, so took this baby and made it walk.
BMC is a business travel agency which was just about to launch their own phone app. They needed their launch video, and they needed it to be visually elegant and, of course, economic.
So… nothing more economic than CG, fellas!
The story would introduce a business stylish travel suitcase. It would then open and concepts like “Hotel”, “Flight Tickets”, and so on would fly right into it. Once full, the suitcase would close and, somehow, become a phone featuring the new BMC travel app. Simple, but clever. Elegant and economic.
We didn´t quite knew how to visually represent travel concepts. Would it be plain icons, would it be video clips… How do they enter the scene? Would it be some giant security-like videowall, would it be flying cards… In the end we came up wit the cube solution. Somehow, the idea of a typical business trip was visually summarized in that cube, each face representing one travel aspect.
The suitcase-into-phone metamorphosis turned up to be easier than initially feared. It´s the simplest ideas that give the best solutions!: sliding a plastic textured box with a couple of buckle like buttons into frame, and showing only its side face from the beginning, gave me the possibility to suggest it was a suitcase by pushing buckles up and opening it like a suitcase. But later on, that plastic look&feel and those buttons would perfectly fit a phone as well in the end, when the suitcase closes, raises, turns to the camera and shows its front face with a big touch display and BMC travel app interface on it. Genious.
So… modelled, animated, textured and lit everything within Maya+ Arnold. Half of the job was done, the other half was about to start: we needed some human touch for the whole thing. Just a female hand interacting with CG would do. After some green screen shooting, keying, compositing and final editing in Nuke, result is this fine elegant piece.
And economic, all right.