Telstra - Deals You Didn't See Coming

A concept for the ATL ads from the Monkeys was handed to us at Telstra Studio. I was asked to animate the "Splat" final artwork asset for use in the Social and DOOH ads. The concept described the shape dropping in with some bounce and "shimmy" (shimmy meaning movement in the z-axis), settling in place, then being lifted up by the ropes to reveal the deal.

Here is the Facebook In-feed video...

About the animation.

For the ropes, I re-created the artwork for them in AE using some bezier paths with a stroke. I wanted to inject some physics-based motion into them, so I used an After Effects plug-in called "Connect Layers Pro". The rope motion I kept subtle to prevent distraction from the main message, look for it after the first bounce on the Digital Out-of-Home portrait version below.

For the bounce motion I used a script from Ukramedia called "Smart bounce", which uses code written by Dan Ebberts (motionscript.com). Smart bounce is great for generating realistic looking bounce and overshoot quickly.

Below is the DOOH Landscape 1920x1080 version...

The main "splat" shape was treated as a 3d object in AE, as motion in the x,y and z axis was needed to achieve the "shimmy". This meant using the AE standard drop shadow wasn't going to work, so I created a drop shadow layer and animated it manually using keyframes to match the motion of the shape above it.

Once the splat animation was approved and finalised, I rendered out this asset as a high resolution ProRes .mov with an alpha channel, making it easy to re-use internally and externally (this was sent to the Monkeys for use in other projects also).

Large format Digital Out-of-Home.

Once the Social videos were approved, some large format DOOH were requested. The ultra wide versions required a different solution, no splat shape for these, instead using a full frame graphic, with some of the animation data re-used.

Here's two examples, the 2732x768 version, and the 3840x1400 version...