Five 3D-artists and two flame compositors worked a little over three weeks to complete this spot featuring a beatboxing dog for Tele2/Comviq, which is a Swedish telecom company. All done in Softimage|XSI 6.5 and Flame.

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Viral logo-less version on youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5NBFRNEztSU

Parallel to when the spot was produced, the dog was forwarded to the Web department for the making of a campaign site. The goal was to create a site in which you should be able to take control over the Tele2 beatboxing dog from the TV commercial. The site visitor should be able to play around with the dog’s movement and sound and record a unique beatboxing session to send to a friend.

Using the material from the TV commercial, the VFX crew at STOPP cut out and adapted animated sequences to use on the site. The head and body of the dog are separate animated objects in the flash project and each of them consists of a number of animations (sniffing, barking, scratching etc). The user can trigger these animations and the belonging sound by pressing designated keys on the keyboard.

The beat that is playing in the background is controlling which frame of the animations that is currently shown so that the movement of the dog is always synchronized with the music. In this way we were able to make the dog sway in beat with music regardless of what action the dog is performing. Since the body and head are separate we had to track the head to the movement to the swaying dog’s neck.
When a site visitor decides to record his/her beatbox session all control input from the user is recorded with individual timings. The data is transformed to an xml file which is uploaded to a database. If the visitor wants he/she can send a link to the beatbox he/she just created to a friend.

When the friend enters the site the recorded data is fetched from the database and the beatbox session can be recreated and replayed for the visitor to be enjoyed. The visitor is then offered the option to make their own individual beatbox.
The coding was done in Flash9/AS3/PHP.

Credit list

Animation: Niklas Lundgren, Janak Thakker
Rig: Niklas Lundgren
Shading/lighting/hair/Rnd: Arvid Björn
Textures: Marko Ljubez
Models: Per Malmqvist
Flame: Johan Boije, Crawford Reilly
Director: Christoffer von Reis / Camp David
Project management: Jesper Pålsson
Flash programming: Fredrik Dahlen
Server programming: Norbert Täubl
Graphics: Nicola Smanio, Fredrik Dahlén
Sound: Fredrik Dahlén

Agency: Forsman & Bodenfos

Clip on: www.stopp.se/portfolioid

Campaign Site on: www.beatbox.tele2.se

Tags: flash
This entry was posted on Saturday, April 19th, 2008 at 12:06 pm and is filed under VFX Projects, Web Production. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.