Arguably the biggest challenge of creating an animation of a proposed resort is the scale of the project. Quite simply a huge amount needs to be modelled. Then consider the developer might have hundreds or sometimes thousands of properties they want to sell, ideally off plan, so understandably they want to start marketing as soon as possible. This typically means an ambitious deadline for the production of the animation, which inextricably influences the time we have for modelling.
This was just the case for a recent project on the North coast of Egypt – and to make it even more of a challenge, our client asked if we could add people into the animation, which is a notoriously difficult thing to do well.
What was our solution?
First of all we didn’t even try and model everything. We prioritised the parts of the resort that were considered most important for marketing, and treated them as separate shots of animation. This made a considerable difference to the amount of modelling required, and meant we could focus our efforts on smaller pockets of the project so there would be no compromise in the quality of our work.
For the people, we teamed up with our Emmy-Award winning friends at Ember Films, to film a cast of actors against a green screen, so they could be composited into our animations.
After six weeks of modelling, four weeks of preparation, three days of shooting in London and two weeks of rendering and compositing, the animation was ready just in time for the launch of the project in Cairo.
The full video was almost 4 minutes long, but you can watch a teaser at the top of this page.