UPS Circus

I just caught sight of this commercial created by PSYOP and agency DONER for The UPS Store, called Circus. We likey the cardboard look and feel. Unsure about the messaging but I guess it works. High level of production, as always from team PSYOP. Here are their notes on concept and production

"The brief from agency was to make worlds out of cardboard that felt simultaneously epic and handmade. We were also given the task of creating characters and environments that looked truly hand crafted with the caveat that everything must always be made of cardboard. We worked collaboratively on a series of scripts in order to finesse the story and craft these worlds.

One challenge we faced was creating a fully cardboard world that could feasibly have been created in a sound stage by stop motion animators. Each character had to be broken apart and looked at from the standpoint that if we were to create this in reality, how would they be built to allow the animators to have the full range of motion required. We didn't want the characters to look "CG", so we tried to not cheat by using tricks in 3D. This forced us to approach character setup with some additional boundaries that in some ways made setup easier, but in others forced to us to become more like mechanical engineers and really focus on the details of believable mechanics.

The geometry we created was also another challenge. 99.9% of the corrugation you see is modeled. We really focused on keeping the details in the model and to not rely on texturing tricks. This posed a challenge for our machines and our modelers. Without running on x64 machines and operating systems we wouldn't have been able to approach the project this way. Even still, we pushed Maya to the limits on what it can handle in a scene at once due to our geometry polygon counts being so high. It also pushed how much corrugation our modelers were able to handle before cracking mentally. Giving our geometry a "messed up" look without going too far was also a challenge. If we kept the geometry too clean, it ended up looking too CG. Psyop Creative Director, Eben Mears, kept referencing lasagna noodles whenever he saw corrugation that was too clean in dailies. On the other hand, if we pushed it too far our cardboard ended up looking like it came out of the garbage so we had to walk a fine line between the two. By keeping these details in the model, we didn't have to worry about getting nice details in model close-ups, shadow effects, or textural detail in lighting and shading. What we saw is what we were going to get in render, and that allowed us a lot more creativity up front.

As with most projects, the hardest part was fitting an epic tale into 25 seconds. All of the scripts read like short films and we worked hard to tell these stories in a visually powerful way but within a tight time frame. Beyond this, the design of the worlds and characters in each spot was intense. Its an interesting struggle to design everything out of cardboard and make it look and feel real. Our use of corrugation and texture, plus the thought that went into the rigging of the characters was an epic struggle in and of itself. "