The Brief
Pair Eyewear approached us to create a 30-second commercial featuring five different eyewear frame styles. Each style needed its individual 1 to 2 seconds of screen time before the film combined all five into one final pack shot.
The client’s mood board defined the tone early on; a warm, sun soaked palette with linen textures and lighting that felt closer to a summer table than a studio set. The brief also called for extreme close-ups throughout the entire film. This required each element including the materials, to hold up at a distance where nothing could be faked.
The Project
Concept, Mood & Storyboard
Prior to creating our models, we developed a lighting and color plan for the whole film based on the client’s mood board. As there were five product (frame) designs, we had to establish a consistent palette as well as lighting throughout the entire film. Once we were done with that, our team put together a complete storyboard in sketch form for client’s approval. A snapshot of it is here:
Modeling
We modeled each of the five frame styles individually in 3D software. No photography or AI-generated imagery was included in our production process. This allowed us complete creative control over how each frame would appear, interact with the surrounding environment and reflect light when viewed from extremely close proximity.
Materials and Lighting
This stage was the most challenging part of the project. We needed to convincingly replicate the subsurface scattering of the clear acetate frames for accuracy under an extreme close up, and the darker frames needed tortoiseshell patterning detailed enough to hold up at that same distance. Due to the request for extreme close-up views in the original brief, replicating these materials took longer than building the actual models.
Animation and Match Cuts
As we had five unique frame designs that needed to be introduced within a single 30 seconds runtime, we utsed match cuts throughout the animation to keep the film feeling like a cohesive thought rather than a collection of five separate clips stitched together. All transitions were designed to take the viewers’ eyes directly from one frame to another.
Final Rendering
The full sequence was rendered in Octane, from model creation through render completion. Every material and light pass was rendered to provide sufficient detail to view clearly at the extreme close-up distances the brief called for.
Delivering Five Aspect Ratios
Five different aspect ratios were delivered with their respective cameras / keyframes created from the same base scene. This way we made sure that all images were properly framed regardless of whether they ended up on a wide-screen platform or vertical story format.
