Buck is back again with another installment for their Mountain Dew campaign. This one brings us through a brief history of the product as we follow a Dew man journey through time. Although the concept has become a bit used and abused, Buck dusts it off with their own personal style.
Utilizing cel animation on top of live action and 3d models for reference, Buck brought in Brooklyn based animation house Augenblick Studios to help out with the extensive cel work that needed to be done.
Here is what Orion Tait, CD at Buck NYC had to say about the process:
Footage was used as an animation guide for the main character. Augenblick studios animated the main character,
and our team did the rest (as a hybrid of 2d cel and 3d animation). For the character, we shot Thomas on a treadmill and constructed an edit. We then illustrated style-frames based on stills from that edit (which you can see up on the site).The edit and style frames then went to Aaron and his team for cel animation. They are very traditional in their approach, which you can really see from their work on superjail. They used the footage as reference to layout key frames, and then started closing the gap with in-betweens, until they got to a fluid 30fps animation. This allowed them to nail the timing and loose look of the illustration and introduce the morphing animation, all while maintaining nice fluid, stylish animation that most rotoscoping lacks.
With every new project Buck releases, they establish themselves as the masters of the pop illustration domain as well as a studio with a knack for high quality production.
Client
Pepsi-Cola Company
Product: Mountain Dew
Executive Producer, Mountain Dew: Barry Rosen
Director, Mountain Dew: Marisol Tamaro
Senior Manager, Mountain Dew: Brett O¹Brien
Manager, Mountain Dew: Lisa Grey
Buck
Creative Directors: Thomas Schmid, Orion Tait
Producer : Erica Hirshfeld
Assistant Producer : Kitty Dillard
Production Coordinator : Kevin Hall
Art Direction : Thomas Schmid
Cel Animation Director : Aaron Augenblick
3d Animation Director : Joshua Harvey
Technical Director : Paul America
Illustrator : Josh Cochran
Illustrator : Thomas Schmid
Cel Character Animation : Augenblick Studios
3d Animator : Joshua Harvey
3d Animator : David Soto
3d Animator Adam Pearlman
3d Animator : Morgan James
3d Animator : Jeff Su
Cel Animator : Pete McDonald
Cel Animator : Joe Mullen
Compositor : Conrad Ostwald
Compositor : Emmet Dzieza
Designer : Ben Langsfeld
Designer : Yker Moreno
Editor : Sam Goetz
Music Composer: Adam Schlesinger
Additional Music Arrangement: Jared Gustat
Actor : Thomas Schmid