Berol was just recently completed for Grey Advertising in Mexico, under my direction. I’m particularly pleased with how the lighting and rendering turned out for this project, although this has a lot to do with the fact that it was globally illuminated. (For more info on global illumination, see global illumination.) This is the third job I’ve worked on that required a combination of 2D and 3D animation (see Firestone and Quaker Oats) and, as usual, keeping track of all the footage became a task of its own. With over 10 different layers per scene, it became crucial to have an organized file structure with accurately dated directories which would facilitate finding the required footage as quickly as possible.

Lots of research and development went into creating the boy’s room since the age group of 10-13 year olds had to be presented fairly accurately. For this, lots of IKEA catalogues were dissected and common toys, that we all used to play with, were looked up on the web and constructed in 3D to litter throughout the messy room.

The spot was modeled and animated with 3D Studio MAX, rendered with Mental Ray, and composited with After Effects. The render times for scene 1 (the first panel below) averaged 3 hours per frame on a dual P3 500, and 1 hour per frame for subsequent scenes.