Cravenomena

One of the more challenging concepts I ever had to animate came when I was hired on a freelance basis to produce a spot for Unifirst Mortgage in Grand Junction, Colorado. For a number of years, Unifirst had been using a cute yellow duck in their advertising — internally, they called him “Howard,” unaware, I think, of Howard the Duck, a Marvel Comics character created in 1973 by the late, lamented Steve Gerber — before Unifirst president Ken Rabideau approached me to visualize his concept of a flock of wild geese being led by the Unifirst duck, and then clustering to form the mortgage company’s logo.

As clients go, unlike many in the Western Colorado market, Ken is a very hands-on manager who had a strong authorial connection to the material, which I respected — his style was more like the clients I worked with in my New York years. It took us a few meetings to work out the visual complexities of his idea, then I drew up a storyboard and set to animating.

One of the challenges of the spot was that Ken envisioned the Unifirst logo forming over the Colorado National Monument, which is probably the Grand Valley’s best-known landmark. I briefly considered downloading geo data for Mesa County and using software like Terragen or e-on Vue to render the Monument, but was dissuaded by the dramatically increased scene complexity that would entail.

Instead, I took a digital photo of the Monument, re-mapped its color tonalities to match the sunset coloration of the sky background I was using, then composited the Monument photo with the sky background to create a very high-res spherical map, which I applied to a giant sphere in Newtek Lightwave‘s Layout module.

As usual, I modeled the characters in Lightwave‘s Modeler, then did most of my rigging and animating in pmg messiah:studio. The duck — which was always intended to be a cartoony, unrealistic character — was a fairly simple rig, but the geese were far more complicated. Each goose’s wings included several chains of procedurally animated bones to create the subtle dynamics of wing feathers moving as the wings flapped.

Another interesting challenge of the spot was in figuring out how to transition from the geese’s well-known “flying V” formation to a cluster with enough individual birds to form a recognizable Unifirst logo. The solution involved some creative shot composition and a complicated particle dynamics setup. I’ll let you judge whether this was successful or not.