This project Celsius was a three part teaser for the launch of the Astro Vibe flavor in France. It aimed to be released in pieces to build up the anticipation, so I tried to unify the three pieces together. I think the third part with the final payoff is the best of the three:
Part 3
Sound Design
I love doing sound design on a piece like this. You can (and I did) spend hours listening to sound effects and music tracks to find the individual pieces that get mixed together exactly how you want. Bass drops. Techno blips. Digital flutter. All sorts of weird little noises that individually are not much but when combined and layered they can create something audibly fun and engaging.
What is so cool is that I could throw out all the effects I had and download a whole new set of beeps, glitches, blips, synths, subs, etc. and build another audio mix that totally works with this as well. The everything sits above the main music, which pivots from an eerie, synth tension to an up beat technological hip hop track. I love how open-ended sound design can be.
Astronaut
I know I'm like 10 years late to animating floating astronauts. Now I understand why they were so popular: you don't have to show and emotions and floating in zero G makes the animation much slower and more deliberate, you don't have as much nuance to worry about inside a big bulky suit like this. It's definitely a good idea for someone starting character animation. Outside of some slow, broad movement on the limbs and some finger curling, there's not much needed here. I had some idea for some more energetic and creative-looking poses, but they didn't make the cut. Need to feature the product more in this particular case. For clarity, this was a model I didn't create it.
The zero G liquid was fun, you basically just turn on the gravity and do an emitter with a little turbulence and viola, floating energy drink.
Glitch
A big element of this project was glitch. It was to be mysterious and help obscure the flavor in anticipation of the reveal. My glitch design advice is to layer as many components as you can so it feels more complex. If you just use a single effect like a filter, adjustment layer, etc. it's going to feel basic and stock. You have to try to do more like stack extra layers, double up on displacement maps, mix between blending modes, offset properties like timing, transparency, position, and scale.
Glitch is primarily thought of as an After Effects concept, there's a variety of different plugins you could use for the effect. But I worked on an idea to make a glitch more detailed as a 3D effect done inside Cinema 4D. I wanted the glitch to feel like it was part of the can object itself, rather than just something layers on top of the video as a filter.
I built a little MoGraph setup using Voronoi Fracture to break apart the can into pieces, offsetting the position and scale of little rings or cross sections. I added a little particle emitter coming off the can for little breakaway pieces of the glitter, like a digital residue or noise. I also used MoGraph to render out black and white mattes to use in compositing because once again, the key is layering. Trying to get a perfect glitch in Cinema 4D in one pass is close to impossible, but if you ad a nice variety of effects inside, then render it out in different passes for compositing in After Effects, you get some nice flexibility to adjust it and dial it in creatively with different layers for complexity.
Edit
I love certain parts of how this came out and so so on others. Probably would have been better to just focus on maybe just two parts in the same production time frame. Overall I think it's a cool piece and looks good as just visuals in short bursts even outside the story or structure as a teaser and reveal.
Part 1
Part 2