AXN Brand Promo - ‘All the Faces of Action’

Ever since I finished AXN’s ‘Moment in Time’ channel promo a couple of years ago, I’ve fancied applying the same technique to human faces. I was also influenced by Onesize’s amazing Playground Festival titles from 2009.

Projection mapping is the technique of projecting a 2D picture onto a 3D object. The 3D geometry gives the picture a third dimension which you can exploit by panning or zooming the camera. You can’t move too much otherwise you start to see the distortion of the image stretched around the sides and back.

At last, back in November, I got the perfect opportunity to do it. Lambie Productions asked me to pitch an idea for AXN’s new brand promo showcasing the upcoming season of programmes. The brief was to focus on the characters’ faces and reveal or dissect them in a ‘cutting edge way’. I won the pitch (see below) and spent January animating it.

I started off using a piece of software called FaceShop which is supposed to generate 3D models from photos but I found it fairly useless. It seemed to generate identical models from different photos. It did at least give me a decent starting point which I then pushed and pulled around in Cinema 4D to fit the various characters. The projections all go a bit wrong around the nostrils so you’ll notice there’s no shots looking up noses! Next, I used Nitro4D’s Thrausi C4D plugin to fracture the model into pieces. Once the model was fractured it was fairly simple using C4D’s mograph to animate the pieces exploding apart in various ways.

As usual with Lambie Productions, I worked closely with director Tim Lacey to reach the final outcome.