Sunshape – Enphase

for Droga5

and Enphase

Sunshape – Enphase

for Droga5
and Enphase

“I love the problem solving and seeing this project come together. The look was really the key thing to get right, and everybody played a part in creating the solution – from modelling through to animation and comp, everyone had to really be in sync and it was great to be a part of.”

MIKE LOMAS

Director

HARNESSING THE
POWER OF THE SUN

The brief was to create a piece that showed how you can harness the power of the Sun to generate your energy. Lauries concept centered around a pair of hands reaching up to grab our bubbling sun, and manipulating it in various ways to metaphorically represent its use. It was to rely on playing with light and shading to create the feeling of night and day, and working with texture to give it a more illustrative feel.

We created 2 spots in an illustrative 3D style, full of colour and shading to bring a unique look and feel to the piece. The opening is a dramatic and energetic close up of the sun, showcasing its size and power. We then bring it into our world by reaching up and grabbing it in the palm of our hand. The sun provides the light in the scene, bouncing off the hands creating interesting shadows and volumes of light at key moments.

Our 30 second spot is very performance based, focused on the visual metaphors of harnessing the sun, where our 15 second spot leads up to introducing the app. The whole thing was bundled up in all the wide and social formats, with some 6 second cutdowns and a few print stills thrown in too.

ENERGETIC 3D
ILLUSTRATIVE STYLE

The concept art was very illustrative and working in 3D things become very precise and lose the hand drawn aesthetic. It was important to find a style that worked for the spot as there wasn’t the timeframe to cel animate it, and we wanted it to look more like stylized 3D as opposed to fake 2D. This was the most important and challenging thing because you need to find the sweet spot for the director’s vision and what it’s possible to create with the
restrictions you have.

In lighting we generated a lot of different shading passes that we could combine, and applied a few compositing tricks to give the piece its own style. Many of the shaded elements are a combination of different subsurface passes with gradient maps applied in comp, topped with multiple specular passes for highlights and brighter areas of grain

We also played close attention to the posing and how each hand shape appeared on screen, and moved between each key moment.

and the most decent human beings you’ll probably ever meet…

executive creative DIRECTOR

Darren Price

head of production

Tina Braham

Producer

Chloe Marshall

Nexus Director

Laurie Rowan

Nexus Producer

Josephine Gallagher

3d lead

Mike Lomas

Designer

Jessica Herrera

rigging

Tessa Eden

lighting

Billy Harrison

Animators

Mike Lomas, Jessica Herrera, Rhys Davey, Peter Goodwin

Compositors

Derek Lau, Claudio Berinato

View similar projects