When Flock & Rally approached us to help them with this project, we had to reach deep into the bag of tricks to pull it off.
The event, Wild Lights, had no previous professional footage to speak of, and they were in need of television and web spots to promote the event! The solution? ANIMATION! We had such a great experience working on the Boo at the Zoo spot that we decided to make a fully animated TV spot for this project with Riverbanks Zoo. We started with basic builds of the "lanterns", which in reality are giant illuminated sculptures of animals, plants, fungi, and more. This began the process of pre-production, and lots of drawing.
From there, we began designing the shots including camera movements, positioning of our subjects in the frame, and the length of the shots.
Next, we designed the "style", which finally settled on "claymation". Textures and movement had to all be adjusted.
After that was lighting, which was the most difficult part. We had many "how do we do this" moments.
Finally, mastering and rendering - over and over and over again. It took roughly one full month of constant editing and revising with our animator to get it just right, but we are so pleased with how it turned out!