Groo here, from Hand Turkey Studios, here to recount to you the harrowing tale of creating our Firefox project. Okay, so maybe it’s not that epic, but we are having a lot of fun. Who ever came up with the idea for this contest and the people who are bringing it to life deserve immeasurable amounts of thanks.
Our studio’s primary strengths are in animation and illustration, and we decided to use them to their fullest in this piece. After hours of discussion, coffee, and scrawls on napkins idea paper, we landed on a concept that focuses on the Firefox brand, using the phrase, “Some things just make sense.” With that idea and a [very] roughly drawn storyboard in hand, we each set to our respective tasks: Warren and Roberto on the body of the piece, and me on the end tag.
And without revealing too much about the body of the spot (What? Us? Ruin surprises? Never!), suffice it to say that Warren and Roberto are producing some excellent inks for this spot. I get excited just thinking about some of them. But that’s all I’m going to say on that (insert evil “mwahahaha” laughter here). However, the animation for the end tag is fair game.
The idea was to get a good strong feeling of the fox moving around the globe. Since that requires a bit more depth than the actual logo gives us, we took a step down the z-axis and built a full 3D model of the Firefox logo. Once the model was done and painted to match the official Firefox logo, it was rigged, keyframed, and animated; swooshing by the camera as it circled the globe. A couple post-production tweaks, some sound (thanks, in no small part, to Roberto), and this part of our project was done.
Now we just have to put the finishing touches on the body of the spot. Hopefully other folks will like it as much as we do. Best of luck to all of you!
~~~ Groo ~~~
maya 7 for life
looks good though
am also submitting a full animation and animated fox
looks great
We used maya 6.5 for ours… upgrading is wicked expensive. We don’t have a fully animated fox but alot of planes :)…. I can’t wait to see this one.
That has got to be one of the coolest things that I’ve ever seen.
I’ve always wanted to see a realist depiction of the Fx logo, Nice work.
And you all have to checkout their version of the Fx logo, it’s simply awesome.
It should be the new Fx logo, maybe release it with 2.0?
http://sheep.handturkeystudios.com/artwork/modeling-a-firefox/
(highlight and drag the address to the Location bar)
:whistle: The MOV animation is awesome. Very tempted to include it in mine. ;)
How long did it take you to match the logos? I can’t find mention of it.
The 3D logo is very well done (except there appears to be a small dent in the bottom right. Kinda breaks the circle flow).
Thanks for the great feedback, everyone. It’s been great fun. And yes, the entire project (with the exception of one sound effect) was created using open source software; Blender, Cinelerra, The GIMP, and Rezound, to be specific. It seemed appropriate to us that we should try and do as much of this spot with OSS as possible.
It took roughly 4-5 hours to model and texture the fox and globe, and there were some further tweaks during the rigging stage… of course, if I had my way, I’d still be tweaking the model :). In fact, the still image in the link above had some tweaks done after it, fixing the curve issue on the bottom right and painting a bit more red on the fox’s back and nose. It looks like this now.
Oh, and Klim, you’re more than welcome to use the animation in yours, if you’d like. Send me an email and we’ll talk ;).
I wonder who should apologize for gringing Groo’s server to a hault… but either way, this sounds like good news for him… I like the images I have soon so far, (yet to actually load the mov)
Wow, you guys are awesome! Interest in our site seems to have brought our humble server down to its’ knees today. I’m not sure the three of us were prepared for the amount of traffic we’ve gotten so quickly, but thanks to anyone and everyone that took a look. Hopefully our server woes will be settled soon. We’ll keep you guys posted.
This is absolutely amazing. I’m both a Firefox fan as a starting Blender user, so seeing the two together is really awesome. Thank you!
[...] Firefox: Some Things Just Make Sense April 13th, 2006 by Groo We’ve completed our Firefox Flicks Ad Contest submission! For those of you following the work-in-progress posts, Modeling a Firefox and Animating a Firefox, you can finally see the finished product. If you read our Guest Post in the Firefox Flicks Backstage Blog, then you’ve got a little background about the concept for this spot. Basically, we’re running with the tagline, “Some things just make sense” and using a mix of our strengths: illustration, animation, and our unique (maybe bizarre would be a better word?) sense of humor. [...]
[...] Hand Turkey Studios, an animation studio from Richmond, Virginia, have prepared the tag-on of their Firefox Flicks entry in Blender. The result is a professional animation that could reach a huge audience. [...]