Syfy Brandworks – Sonic

Sonic Summer of Shakes – Syfy Ad spot

Way before GPU render engines were a thing, when TFD was pretty much the only practical fluid-sim – during the summer of 2013, Sonic wanted to promote their 25 new shakes leading up to their peak-sales time during the Summer. We had :25-:30 to come up with a spot to highlight the new Sonic flavors. Since this was a brand-integration we had to tie the Sonic spot with Syfy, and the best way to do that was to utilize our tagline ‘Imagine Greater.’ We decided to tackle an brand-integration spot internally. We worked from the script which Justin Grazioli wrote and started with boards and ended with the final spot that we aired on our network. Some key processes are explained in detail further in this page if you’re interested in learning more.

Credits

Creative Director: Shea Pepper
Design Director: Calvin Chu
Project Manager: Jamie Fine
Writer/ Producer Justin Grazioli
Designer/ Animator: Ariel Frost
Designer/ Animator: David O’Brien
Designer/ Animator: Bobby Ushiro
Rigging: Bobby Ushiro
Lighting & Shading: Panetelis Nikolaides
Liquid Sims: Marcelo Cermak

Frames

Some early animatics and render-tests that were presented to the Creative Director for notes and feedback. Keep in mind that at this time, we were working in the Standard render engine. My role was part-animator/designer and also a TD, overseeing aspects of the pipeline to ensure that all the pieces would come together in the end.

Process

Scene layout, animation, & setup.

Texturing and lighting.

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Simuluations.

Animatics.

Rigging.

UVPhactory re-used our assets to create a spot that aired the following year. UV modeled a few extra assets and textured a few additional shakes for the updated brief. The lighting in the scene was also redone. UV polished the project to the next level that I know we could have done internally had we had another 2 weeks to polish up some scenes.