| Title | #NEXTFRAME |
| Brand | THE ABSOLUT COMPANY |
| Product/Service | ABSOLUT VODKA |
| Category |
A10. ANIMATION |
|
Entrant Company
|
SID LEE Amsterdam, THE NETHERLANDS
|
|
Advertising Agency
|
SID LEE Amsterdam, THE NETHERLANDS
|
|
Production Company
|
JIMMY LEE Amsterdam, THE NETHERLANDS
|
Credits
| James Yeats Smith |
Sid Lee Amsterdam |
Creative Director |
| Roger Leebody |
Sid Lee Amsterdam |
Associate Creative Director |
| Gillian Glendinning |
Sid Lee Amsterdam |
Associate Creative Director |
| Sebastien Partika |
Sid Lee Amsterdam |
Creative |
| Edouard Olhagaray |
Sid Lee Amsterdam |
Creative |
| Andrew Peet |
Sid Lee Amsterdam |
Senior Designer |
| Emily Creek |
Sid Lee Amsterdam |
Group Account Director |
| Simon Wassef |
Sid Lee Amsterdam |
Head Of Strategy |
| Jonah Dolan |
Sid Lee Amsterdam |
Account Manager |
| Ezra Xenos |
Jimmy Lee |
Head Of Production |
| Justin Townsend |
Jimmy Lee |
Producer |
| Rafael Grampa |
Rafael Grampa |
Writer/Director |
| Mario Ucci |
Red Knuckles |
|
| Rick Thiele |
Red Knuckles |
|
| Monica Domanska |
Field Trip |
Producer |
| Red Knuckles |
|
Additional company |
| CROACIA |
|
Additional company |
| WAKE THE TOWN |
|
Additional company |
Brief Explanation
Dark Noir is the story of Vincent Black, a private investigator with a gift for seeing the ideas in people's minds…and who has stolen them from others. He is contracted by a mysterious old man to find ideas stolen from him by a jilted lover many years ago. Black goes on a journey, encountering daemons, alchemists and the sinister Madaleana, the beautiful thief, until he finally discovers the truth about the old man, Madaleana and his own gift/curse.
The story was written by graphic novelist Rafael Grampa. His main inspiration was Plato’s Theory of Forms, which says that our reality is merely a dark shadow of an intangible reality made up of ideas.
The designs of the characters were also his and a lot of work was put into how to translate them to 3D and still maintain those gritty forms and intricate detail which all his designs contain. For the films cinematography and overall art direction we were heavily influenced by films like Blade Runner and In the Mood for Love, where light and colour play main roles in conveying mood and emotion.
Creative Execution
#NextFrame is a collaboration between Absolut Vodka and Brazilian graphic novel creator Rafael Grampá. It is a crowd-sourced animated film project which invited five million Facebook fans to help co-create a story by Grampá that he called ‘Dark Noir’.
Rafael asked for inspiration and thousands of people submitted their ideas and original artwork via Facebook. Fans could influence the action, design characters, choreograph dances, even design the lead character’s tattoos.
We used Maya, Zbrush, Photoshop and Nuke, make special use of Maya’s open architecture for tool/pipeline development. We used Nuke for compositing and when integrating 2D animation into the 3D scenes.
Zbrush was used not only for the main modelling, but also for hair grooming with fibermesh, that was then exported to Maya as guides to be attached to the mesh with nHair. Grease Pencil in Maya was also extensively used on scenes that had 2D animation, our animators would animate in 3D and straight away sketch a rough 2D Animation in the viewport, making it a lot easier to sync 2d and 3d interaction.
In effect this allowed us to create a new style for animated films mixing digital paintings with flat 2d animation and 3d animation and still manage a harmonious finish.
With Dark Noir we also developed a technique for positioning initial concept matte paintings on every shot and then modelling environments on demand, then projecting the matte painting and fix stretches and holes on a 3D painting package.