Creating The Minions ID 10 Spot

The Minions project was a great experience. It was a ton of work but we pulled through and the client was more pleased.  Not to mention the social media likes and attention it recieved.

We needed to tie minions into Shark Week and what better way then to stick them into the middle of the ocean surrounded by sharks. Our editor Kyle came up with this concept. He did a rough cut using footage from the trailer. It worked perfectly as he was able to find all the right reaction shots to tell our little story. The only thing was all this action took place on the side of a road with no water in sight. But it was too funny to pass up on. To accomplish this I used almost every program I had and 1 new one.

Programs and plugins used were After Effects, Psunami Plugin, Element 3D Plugin, Particular, Optical Flares, Maya and Vue.

The minions were mostly all rotoscoped from the trailers. Mainly from the scene where they are hitchhiking on the road. The water was all created with the Psunami plugin for After Effects and the island was created with Vue. All the camera movements were created to match the inital crane down on Kevin from the trailer.

All the sharks and the minions raft were created in Maya. The sharks were rendered from Maya but the boat was exported as an OBJ and brought into After Effects via the Element 3D plugin. That allowed me to manipulate the movement of the boat with Kevin parented to it.

All the underwater looks (like the bottom half of the raft, bottom half of the minions title and the underwater sharks) were created with some simple distortion effects, blur, blending modes and color. The ripples in the water at the end splashdown were created with a displacement map on the pre rendered water element. I used the same displacement ring to mask off an area for color correction to darken the water. I was very happy with the end result.

The soft look of the Psunami effects, the island with the especially large palm trees and the less then realistic shark action mixes well with the animated minions creating a nice blend of their graphics and ours.

Creating The Minions Newspaper Spot

This was a real fun one to do. John our Creative Director and Owner here at Magic Feather came up with this idea. Again we needed to tie this into Shark Week so his idea was to have the sharks themselves reviewing the movie. So funny!

To accomplish this one I started by creating all the newspaper headlines and art in Photoshop at fairly large resolution. Then I moved over to Maya. The newspapers were all one model, slightly altered visually, and then UV mapped with a separate texture assigned to the area where the movie footage would go.  I did this so I could isolate that area once in After Effects.  I exported the models out as OBJ and brought them into After Effects using the Element 3D plugin.

I then created a pre comp for each newspaper containing the movie footage for the cut along with the freeze and color correction to black and white. Those pre comps were then used as a texture for the newspaper image.

I broke the animations into sections and key-framed the newspapers falling into frame and the camera movements into the images. I also used some deforms from Element 3D to try and create some bouncing movement as newspapers landed on top of one another.

The final Minions title with the moving eye was not at all long enough for what we needed. I ended up retiming the eyeball portion, looping it back and forth, mixing it around and sticking it back into the logo to get it to follow the minion with the bubble overtop.

It was a very fun project to work on. Lots of rendering with this one. Nice long renders once the final look and was applied to all the shot. So much fun.