Whiskas

I was fortunate enough to work with Elmwood to animate the new Whiskas rebranded logo.

The concept was to have daylight spill through onto the picture from the top left, casting a silhouette of the Whiskas cat logo with a long shadow, and filled in by the shaded shape as it became visible. The 'W' would act as the cat's mouth and nose, before the rest of the wordmark drew on. The animated glow behind the logo replaced the daylight rays. The final version can be seen here:

It went through a few iterations, and ended up being built using a combination of Cinema4D for the cat's ear twitch and volumetric lighting rendered in Redshift. The cat head shape was extruded geometry, with the vertex points around the ear animated with a soft selection to create the deformation, along with a slight rotation of the whole shape. This method was chosen because, while a bit more complicated, the result was cleaner than animating the shape just in After Effects. The long shadow cast by the light was simply an animated path, tracking the edge of the cat shape to mask out the light layer.

This was used for the intro and outro of the Whiskas 'Purradise' campaign video, hosted at the 'Piccadilly Lights' advertising screen in London:

An earlier version of the animation as part of a previous concept for the 'Piccadilly Lights' can be seen here. The lighting moved from top to bottom in this earlier build, casting shadows from the ears going upward. In the end, it was decided to keep the light static without movement in favour of being more subtle and less complicated:

A 3D Whiskas cat head logo 'Disco Ball' was also built using Cinema4D, rendered again in Redshift. For detail, smaller versions of the cat head logo were cloned to the outside of the model acting as mirror reflectors. The cat head shapes, on the wall behind, are just fake reflections animated in After Effects. This version has the Whiskas brand mark appear in 3D from behind the 'Disco Ball':

The version below has no wordmark, just the 'Disco Ball' spinning so the details can be seen more clearly: 

The animation below shows a use case for it in a social media video concept:

In addition to the above other work was completed, for example an exploration of tracking "PURR" text to footage of cats:

This was an experiment with CG fur made using Cinema4D Native Hair & Fur Tools, with the fur animating on from different areas:

And finally, the video below has other miscellaneous bits of work, which included animating the "Purr More" text and some abstract patterns/elements to coincide with the cat purr audio:

Email: Contact@dbvfx.com