MBNA - The Power Behind Your Credit Cards

For this project we worked directly with MBNA to produce and create this TVC spot. We came up with the concept and creative, and then worked alongside a copywriter to produce the script which we then pitched to the client.

Once we had won the job the director proceeded to work very closely with one of The Studio 3D operators to develop and direct the idea into a moving animation. This proved to be technically challenging due to the sheer amount of cards that needed to be animated and triggered by each other in order to build our world of credit cards. Everything had to be scripted carefully to work together not to mention how big our scene became as we added and animated more and more structures. In the end more than 10,000 cards were created, each and everyone had an expression tagged to it to allow bespoke animation or to be triggered by other instances.
Cinema 4d and its Mograph module was the obvious choice. We tried to keep everything very light: we used Instances under a Cloner to lay the main credit card grid, made it editable (so we could change these "main" instances in other credit cards or buildings made of credit cards) and then select some of these instances and animated them with a Fracture object and Plain or Shader effector.
To create the buildings, we used a Cloner and the instance of the credit card model (we really struggled to keep the project manageable), a Shader and a Color shader on the texture to keep the side of the cards white but not the top of the building. A light Random effector helped us giving a little bit of realness on the stack of cards.
The Fracture object usually moves the pivot point to the center of the object, but not with the Instances. So, using Instances were the best choice for our projects: we had total control on the cards and on their axis center.
Even each card is an Extrude object of just one instanced rectangle spline: in this way we could change the spline points at once.
The project was composited in Nuke then refined in Smoke before being graded using Resolve. The work flow worked brilliantly from C4D to Nuke as camera data could be shared as well as inital Nuke scripts outputed straight from C4D.
On this project we decided to render seperate passes rather than EXR. files due to the timings however we have used both methods with complete success.

The entire production took a little over 4 weeks to finish, with a synchronized print campaign to follow up the TVC led by our creative upon launch.

My involvement in this project was as Director/designer and compositor.
Post Production - The Studio London - C4D / Nuke / Smoke