Mighty Nice was excited to collaborate with Finch, Heckler and Infiniteyay to help build the “Imagine Nation.” Mirvac’s first ever brand campaign in 50 years!

Working with our friend, Director Toby Pike, we created various animated sequences in different styles to showcase a wide selection of Mirvac's projects. Our story begins with Alex, the hero character, sketching on tracing paper against the glass of a high-rise window. As the drawing develops, we transition to the first animated stop motion section...

The scene looked out over a distant city that slowly became time-lapse footage. We placed the footage on a large LED screen beneath a sheet of perspex and shot everything top-down, with the background advancing independently to create depth and distance. For the second stop motion section, origami birds carry a paper house through the sky, setting it down softly amongst the natural landscape.

As Alex travels through the Imagine Nation, the world around her transforms with every new Mirvac location she visits.

We travel from the stop motion world to High Forest. A community in the Australian bushland, High Forest features a gigantic heart structure made of native flora in the middle. Friends and neighbours gather under the trees in harmony.

We created this environment in a rich, detailed 2D animation style. With a fairly symmetrical composition, the High Forest world radiates warmth and connection, with a touch of dramatic lighting to indicate late afternoon weather on a sunny day.

After leaving High Forest, Alex tumbles headlong into Olivine, a thriving community playground brought to life in digital 3D clay.

The clay style is something that we love to do, and the animation flows very nicely into this world from the 2D style that precedes it. With this being one of Mirvac’s existing locations, our concept artist had plenty of real world reference to begin stylising the environment, whilst staying true to the actual play space.  We continued this into the character design, making our clay Alex feel like a stop motion miniature.

From there the 3D team began sculpting the characters and environment. Our custom clay materials were applied and our lighters got to work, making sure the details shone. Specific features were added to the character rigs to make sure the animation felt like stop motion, such as having the eyes blink in stages. In animation, our artists animated every second frame to replicate a real stop motion shoot.

For our final animated section, Mirvac’s Pitt Street building was transformed into a vibrant, 2D illustrative style. The building itself has many intricate details, which were recreated as an accurate painted model of Pitt Street and its internal lobby.

To help with this, Mirvac provided their architectural design files which we extracted information from and rebuilt for animation. We set up cameras around the building for our 2D painter to create still renderings of each viewing angle. These were then projected onto the geometry so that we could get the look of a high end 2D illustration, but the movement of a 3D piece.

This project really played to the Mighty Nice team's strengths. From stop motion, to crafted 2D animation and 3D character work, our studio managed many different production methods under the one roof. With a lot of moving parts across several different studios, it was very satisfying to see all the pieces come together at the end!