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A feast for the senses.
"Flor & Fjære is a unique family owned destination located on an island in the cold fjords outside Stavanger, Norway. A one-of-a-kind greenhouse restaurant that can seat up to 600 guests, placed in the middle of 50 acres of incredible gardens with beautiful beaches and tropical palm trees – a visit there is both peaceful and exciting."
Studio Oker invited us to animate this amazing illustration by Finnish illustrator Robert Lönnqvist as part of a set of brand illustrations expressing the emotional experience of Flor & Fjære. They just sent us the illustration file and the rest, from thinking how it would look animated to the animation itself, was on us.
Studio Oker invited us to animate this amazing illustration by Finnish illustrator Robert Lönnqvist as part of a set of brand illustrations expressing the emotional experience of Flor & Fjære. They just sent us the illustration file and the rest, from thinking how it would look animated to the animation itself, was on us.
We had a blast collaborating on this piece, and it was a great opportunity to put our animation skills in action.
A garden full of keyframes.
Having 2 days in total to make 246 layers moving and grooving, we needed all the help from our experience and our animation utility belt. For the animation nerds like us out there, here are details of the creation process, and plugins that might help you in a pinch.
[nerd alert]
For starters we organized, named and labeled by hand eeevery single layer from the .PSD file they sent us.
To preserve the intricate juxtaposition of elements from the illustration, pre-comping them would be no good. The Focus tool inside Motion 4 helped us to "group" several elements from the same comp without precomping them, and keeping everything organized. We were able to colour, isolate and lock each one to make the preview and the animation process easier and less confusing.
This tool called "puppet_rig_2019" helped us transform the puppet pins into null objects with a prefix name. Motion 4 has something like it, but it creates a pin icon instead, and we prefer the good old squared null for this mishmash of elements on screen.
During the animation we coloured groups of keyframes so we could keep track of what was doing what, and to be able to move related groups of keyframes around in a glance. For that we used Labels 4, but newer versions of After Effects can do it natively.
We wanted to replicate the water ripples from the illustration, so we tested several photoshop brushes to find the closest one, and then animated the ripples frame by frame in Photoshop timeline + AnimDessin 2. To transfer everything back to After Effects, we used Timelord.
Then was just a matter of moving some keyframes and curves around, tweaking textures and effects, and voilá.
We love to flex our native after effects skills, but having the right tool can help you getting to more refined results in a short time. We hope showing the amount of care and love we put into into this deceivingly simple loop inspires you and helps on your workflow on the long run too.
Client: Flor & Fjære | Year: 2023
Service: Character Animation, Animation
Creative Direction: Studio Oker | Illustration: Robert Lönnqvist
Character Animation: RANDO BANDO (Bebeto Cahali)
Cel Animation: RANDO BANDO (Mateus Klein)
Project Management: Thalyta Cavalli
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