This animation was created for entry in an animation competition in the category of motion graphics. The competition required that entrant make a 60 second animation that advertised a theme or product. I though that I would be most successful if I tried to promote something in an exciting the unconventional way that didn't obviously lend itself to that kind of promotion. I chose to make an advertisement showing the effects of a fictional multi-vitamin brand and though it was seen from a microscopic level.
I first listed all the vitamins I wanted to show and then thought of a scene which would best show them. In the first scene a torrent of red blood cells gush past the camera to set up for the vitamin K display. Then there are some cut-in shots of heart valves as though the camera is travelling up to the brain, where nerve cells can be seen in the next group of shots. I showed the brain or nervous sequence to some friends after the animation's completion and they said it remined them heavily of the intro to the film Fight Club even though, at the time I hadn't seen that film at all. I guess it was because I was going for a false colour electron micrograph look to the animation in that scene, which has a very particular look, which is what the Fight Club creators' must have been going for too.
From the brain the camera goes on to the eye along the optic nerve. At this point I wasn't sure about how to link in other sites on the body where vitamins could be shown, but after a brain storming session I thought about maybe seeing the reflection of something in the front of the eye could be a good way of showing the viewer the physiological reaction somewhere else in the body. In the next scene the heart is shown pumping quickly and then increasing it rhythm as two small explosion happen close by.
One of the things I always liked and wanted to emulate in animation work I did was they way in Tex Avery cartoons a character would run in a chase sequence and have to turn a corner very quickly, but as they did so they would skid and slide off the celluloid, showing the rolling 'perfs' of the film stock shooting past them upwards as they regained their footing and continued the chase back onto the film. I thought it was always cool how the animators had included part of the fact that it was an animation running on a roll of film in the projector rather than trying to make it exactly like real life. In this animation I tried to do this by following the heart sequence with a connecting sequence where the frames of the animation appear as polaroid photographs that appear out of thin air and bring the viewer to the next scene where a skeleton break dances to unline the importance of vitamins connected with bones. The polaroids are supposed to be showing an animation of the rib bones connecting together around the heart and extending down to the arm. They were supposed to act a little bit like frames in a zoetrope but the effect was lost a little bit as they pass by the camera.
The last sequence with the skeleton was animated using the native bone system in 3D Studio Max. Articulating the skeleton wasn't too difficult but getting the impression of a wave of motion passing backwards and forwards across the arms was tricky but I got it in the end. Overall the animation took 7 days or 8 if you include the rendering to different formats from Adobe After Effects. I enjoyed making an animation that was quite abstract and stylised but showed realistic things as well. I think on thing that helped the animation get wrapped up in a relativly short amount of time was the fact that it involved a lot of particle sequences that were quite quick to set up and render. Also I think most of the models in the animation didn't have very complicated texture maps and relied instead on more complicated materials or shaders to accomplish there look.

TIME TO COMPLETE: 7 DAYS