Skittles

I worked with Elmwood on the early development of motion principles for the Skittles rebrand. 

Below is the before and after comparison I was asked to make for the logo change, morphing from the old to the new wordmark. It's subtle but significant. The 'K' for example is now rounded, and the whole logo has more depth and extrusion, pointing slightly towards the top right, as opposed to straight on, as per the original design:

The first animation work I completed here was the Skittles 'Squishy Clouds' pack. From this point, the way the wordmark animates on (with a sequential scale up, that has a bit of bounce per character) more or less remained the same with slight tweaks. The rainbow on the other hand ended up evolving quite a bit. Here in this very first attempt, the whole arch of the rainbow is revealed at the same time, left to right:

The animation below has two versions with a change at the second half. I didn't make the 3D model for the Skittles ‘Lentil’ asset, I did however animate it in Cinema4D and prepare it's texturing for rendering in Redshift. The first version below has the iconic red Skittle drop to the ground and bounce. No physics simulation was used for this; it was all keyframed. The second version below used the red Skittle as a window transition device to a new scene, where a lady is blowing bubbles with Skittles in them:  

This is the first time the Skittles 3D ‘Lentils’ were used to draw on the rainbow element. Each band of colour being on a separate layer, so that they can be revealed individually:

Here the rainbow's bands of colour can be seen animating on with an offset, without any ‘Lentils’ leading them:

Here, the Skittles come falling down the rainbow, as if it were a slippery ramp, and go flying off screen up the other side:

In this example, the Skittles all burst out at the twist of the rainbow in an explosion, then fly off screen in all directions:

Ultimately though, the final overall style chosen was to have the Skittles draw on the rainbow's bands of colour one by one, evenly offset as can be seen here:

Many other bits of work were done, like this key visual example of a super wide screen subway advert:

Also, there was an idea for an epic scale enormous red Skittle rolling into a city. The environment was a still photo that was brought to life with some camera shake, steam effects and reflections of the giant Skittle in the windows of the buildings, all composited with sound effects in After Effects. The Skittle itself was animated in Cinema4D and rendered in Redshift:

There was another idea where the rainbow would flip over from a sky background, with sunlight passing through the colour bands, switching to a red background colour once it hit the red of the rainbow. It was made in After Effects using a brilliant plug-in called 'BOA', which can be used to distort a flat image on a 3D plane with twists. It seemed like a perfect tool to use and the end result was very good. However, it was not possible to get it to match the 2D illustrated artwork for the rainbow perfectly. It's quite close in shape, but the red band for example is wide, and it needed to be a one-to-one match of the final lock up, so couldn't be used in the end:

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