The Mill 3D team have just completed a mammoth campaign called ?‚àö√ë‚àö‚â§Feel Everything’s for Sky TV to promote the new HD format the channel have recently adopted.

The Mill worked hand in hand with design company Venture Three, who wanted to create five ‘feelings’ which had their own character. Each one was based on an emotion; Intense, Euphoric, Alive, Hot, and Serene. We also wanted to reflect what HD delivers; mind blowing detail, depth of field and full on vibrant color. Venture Three wanted the animations to make your eyes bleed!

Due to the nature of the job, it was almost impossible to storyboard. At each stage of production the ?‚àö√ë‚àö‚â§feelings’s were growing and evolving into something new. The original plan was to do 5 six-second idents, which grew into 5-15 second ads. The animation was looking so fantastic with details you felt you could reach out and touch, that in the end, in addition to the idents we created a 60 second spot for cinema and a 30 second ad for television.

The Mill 3D team worked very closely with Venture Three Creative Director Graham Jones to establish the look and feel of the project. They studied references of deep-sea creatures and microscopic organisms for movement and textures. The team then created a unique look that was part realistic part graphical. Once the five 15 second ads were created, which each had completely different colour palettes and movements, we began the task of putting them together.

The 15 second spots were created in two different 3D softwares, so firstly we used Mill in-house software to bring the two together and create the animatic. The 3D team then conceptualised and created environment effects, particles and trails of light among other effects to bring the different worlds together.

Shake played a vital role in completing the job, as it has the ability to use proxy renders and only update to HD when required. This meant we didn’st have to render to HD every time we updated the composite. This enabled the production to remain very organic as we had the freedom to explore new ideas.

For final completion each frame was rendered to 1920×1080 with 5 different sections and more then 20 different passes, so all in all we were dealing with around 40,000 high def frames.