Beginning of October I was contacted via my representatives by a swiss agency from St. Gallen, Yjoo.
They had a visually appealing and technically (at least for me) quite challenging project and wanted me to do the illustration and animation. The client, the Urner Kantonalbank was going for a strategy change and wanted to communicate this through an animated film.
The project kickoff was in november, and with an aim to have a first final version ready for december it was clear that the timing was tight. As the storyline had been provided by the agency and worked quite well i directly started with some character sketches and the storyboard. After a few drafts we agreed on the characters, style and storytelling and I went on with illustrating all characters, poses elements and background.
The challenge was to have a camera flight starting in a birdseye view of a map (of the Kanton Uri) and flying in and out of three different locations and scenes. Because this is no real 3D, rather 2.5 D I had to find a way to synchronically rotate all elements on the map according to the camera movement. This brought a hell of a lot of trouble with it: disappearing mountains, houses that jump over trees and all kinds of layer trouble. I never had a project with so many unexpected errors or bugs, and so many renders in between.
In the end, it all worked out of course. The client received a good version in time, and with a bit of extra time (two weeks) another version, (nearly) bug free, and with all the shadings and sructures I had in mind.
Oh, did I mention that it also quite complex to choreograph around 12 people in one scene…?
watch it here or click below.
Agency: Yjoo / Suisse
Creative Director: Jan Walser
Sound: BLOOP . SOUND AND MUSIC
Roland Roller Frei
www.bloop.ch
Client: Urner Kantonalbank