#smile factory

[thunder-jolt]

Hey, Oddworld fandom. Do we remember that there was once an Oddworld horror fangame called "Oddworld: Smile Factory"?

Just asking as a way to talk about an idea that has something to do with Oddworld and the prospect of it being horror or horror-based.

[makiyadkaze]

yall remember this guy, he has a tontata twin

[m00n-rae]

nobody:

me 24/7: MOMONOSUKEEE

[ltdumpsterfire]

Exciting news! My debut single ‘Diplomacy’ is dropping soon! Stay tuned for updates.

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[konsum]

Hustin Zitrone-Ingwer mit Vitamin C

[jack-hudson]

Rowntrees  - The Smile Factory (Directors Grade)

Directed by Jack Hudson and Major Briggs 

Blinkink X Blink Art collaboration

Agency - JWT

[jack-hudson]

Rowntrees- The Smile Factory

Making of - Part 2 

So the work began in Jan 2016 and after a long ol’ wait, it finally came out of research. Major Briggs and I then began working with the Blink Ink team to bring this baby to life!

Above are two development sketches of the interiors within the jelly tot and the fruit pastille factory. The jelly tot was a slight issue when it came out of research as 1.People didn’t quite understand that this factory was meant to be tiny compared to all the others and 2. The lasers seemed a bit intoxicating and inappropriate (I personally loved the sci-fi vibe but it wasn’t quite right) So I tried out a few different options to present to the client, involving a giant magnifying glass and some squashing arm mechanisms, which in the end is the design they went for.

The characters within this jelly tot factory needed to look confined but comfortable so we threw in a couple of armchairs and levers to help the little guys out. These renders show the factories in full CG which I was completely psyched to see but they still lacked some of that 1950s texture and charm we were looking for.

Our producer Janet Smith then installed the help of matte painting wizard Mike Shorten to directly paint over the black and white 3D render in Photoshop. When these versions came back, we couldn’t believe our luck, genius! The first one on the top left was a Frank Soltesz inspired paint over but we wanted to keep the colours nice and bright to suit both the Rowntrees branding and my own work, so we commissioned Mike to do a full paint over using my original sketched colour references.

There was also a request from the agency to make the characters appear more realistic, this was difficult for me to do personally and detach myself from my own working process so Mike also worked up a few shaded versions of my characters for the agency to see.

The difficult task then for the 2D animation team was to work out how to animate the fully shaded character versions. Joe Sparrow worked on these brilliant step by step instructions for animators to use that involved three layers to every frame; colour, shadow and highlights. These layers were then overlaid, slightly blurred and softened in comp to embed them into their environment.

Rather than creating the exterior of the sweet in CG Major Briggs, Blinkink and I decided that it would be amazing to drop the 3D interior into an actual sweet so that it would have a slight stop motion feel and still remain tactile. However we found that actual Rowntrees sweets just melted under the studio lighting so we enlisted the help of a model maker to build giant versions of all three sweets... awesome! The doors of the sweets were then shot opening and closing at Clapham Road studios with director of photography Toby Howell on a big beast of a camera.

These are the final results - a mixture of 2D illustration/animation, model making, 3D rendering, matte painting, 100s of emails, 2 brain melts, many meetings, 20 headaches and a thousand high fives. Thanks team, it was a joy to be a part of and if you look closely  I even managed to sneak in a tiny award of excellence or (bad) health and safety onto the wall of the Jelly tot factory to act as a little pat on the back to us all :)

Click here to see the finished advert with all the credits.  

[jack-hudson]

Rowntrees- The Smile Factory

Making Of - Part 1 - The Pitch

In July 2015 Major Briggs and I were tasked with the challenge of co-directing and storyboarding a commercial for Rowntrees sweets through our agents in a Blink Ink x Blink Art collaboration.

All I know is that as soon as I saw the phrase ‘1950s style cutaway style illustration inside a fruit pastille’ I was completely sold! Not knowing whether the project would ever take off at this stage I began with this rather elaborate sketch.

This sketch was for the randoms sweet factory which of course had a completely ‘random’ theme,  unicycling workers catching tropical fruits from a vibrating tree (then later to find out that absolutely no fruits could be shown within the factory... of course!)

Major Briggs then started to build the factories bit by bit in CG, which blew my tiny 2D mind, it was so awesome to see a plain old sketch turn into three dimensions!

We then worked together to try and reach the right balance of intricacy meets bold. I’d provide various notes on Major Briggs’ designs and then we’d tweak away until all was looking great. Once we were happy, it was time to add some colour based on a few palette options I’d suggested.

We dropped the interiors into a photograph Blink Ink had taken on a macro scale. I then dropped all my little character designs into the factory in PS and added shadows to bring it to life. At this point we wanted it to feel tactile, like these little guys and items would rattle around if you were to pick the sweet up and shake it. It took me back to owning my beloved Mighty Max toys when I was a kid.

We were then hit with the bombshell that every sweet would be on screen for around 6 seconds, therefore the mock up we had produced thus far was too intense to even focus on for that amount of time. We had a rethink and began to simplify, the agency wanted to see the juice flowing around the entire sweet with clarity.  

We then decided to tackle the fruit pastille factory, which had a theme and emphasis on all things chewy, so chomping teeth machines were of course essential! The MB guys then built this beautiful looking model from my sketch, which I once again dropped my little workers dudes into and did some animation tests with the guys over at Blink Ink

It worked!! After months and months of back and forth before even finding out if the job was ever going to surface and then sitting and waiting through 2 months of market research... Just when I though it was never going to happen, in January 2017 we got the call, it was a go go!

See my next post for how the next part went down in the Making of Part 2