Figliulo asked us to create a print and two fifteen second spots for Orville Redenbacher —in two weeks. Our specialized teams worked together to come up with a time-efficient solution: to create the campaign in CGI. The client agreed but it was imperative that the final imagery was photorealistic — so our CGI team, whose skills are built on the rules of photo realism, got to work. Read below to see how we went from the initial concepts to two final animations and a print image in just two weeks.

The campaign showed the comparisons between Orville Popcorn and its nearest competitor with the end goal of communicating that a bag of Orville contained more popcorn. The keys to successfully producing this campaign would be adhering to the aggressive timeline and ensuring that the popcorn looked real.

Our specialized CGI pipeline was used for the production of all print, animation and digital assets. We began with completing scene setups and then moved to the modeling process, where we created the high resolution bowl and popcorn. Then, we started animation, where we simulated the popcorn’s movement. Following that, we created the popcorn by applying materials, lighting, and shading to give the kernels a translucent quality. We ensured that we were able to re-use the assets from the print image in animation and digital, allowing us to expedite the production timeline.

During the post production phase, we took our raw renderings and composited them together in Nuke. Having the flexibility to relight our renders saved us from having to re-render the shots multiple times.