1999
Kinko's
The Big Idea
There are a few special things about this spot which also happened to mark a technological turning point for animation, at least for me.
I had been playing around with “2.5D” with Cinema 4D back in 1998 (see Joyride Snowboards spot) but mapping animations onto planes led to erratic results. Enter Discreet Logic’s *effect. Once I saw the program, I approached Tim Leake about wanting to do a spot using the software. He wrote “The Big Idea” and it became a pet project of mine at Gadget School in 1999.
We ended up becoming a beta site for *effect and many of our feature recommendations ended up in what would become Combustion, *effect’s successor.
Credits:
Martinique Segrefe-Lin did all of the character creation and cell animation which was then scanned and loaded into Discreet Logic's *effect. We animated the spot in about 1 week. I acted as creative director and *effect animator. It was the beginning of 2.5D, significantly before After Effects caught on.