Elite Imaging Powers Up An Exciting Animation For Boeing

Elite-Imaging has created quite a number of digital animations for their clients over the years but when Boeing contacted them for a new project they were faced with a particular challenge.

They would be required to create an animation to specifically fit on a 3D surface. "This was a whole other layer to the project," said Frank Cords, president of Elite Imaging. "The initial requirement of this project was that it not be put on a DVD. The actual criteria was to have one of those illumins domes. They are [hemispherical] domes. They have different versions from 5 feet to 20 feet. Basically, people are inside the dome and at the center of the dome is the projector that projects in a 160 degree field of view." All of the other challenges of commercial animation were there but Frank Cords felt his company was up to the challenge.

Elite Imaging is a very experienced CGI production company, having done work for big-budget movies such as "The Truman Show" and Inspector Gadget, as well as 3D medical animations, animated logos for many major businesses, and animated lead-ins for television events.

Frank was given a fairly rough storyboard of what Boeing wanted. Working from Boeing's vague storyboard, Frank created his own timeline. He found that Boeing's original estimated timing on the sequence of two-and-a-half minutes was vastly under calculated, in particular the stage separation. They didn't realize that each separation would take a fair amount of time to show.

Frank enlisted a partner on this project, Jeff Meyers, located in Cincinnati, Ohio. While Frank prefers to work in CINEMA 4D, he accepts and encourages the people he works with to work in the software that suits them best. Frank was particularly impressed with how seamlessly he could incorporate CINEMA 4D with other high-end 3D graphics suites.

During the whole process Frank had to keep in mind the distortion factor. "What this means is that we had to render our animations in a super wide field of view, about 140 degrees and oversized, with more pixels than we were actually going to need at the end, because we were going to have to distort it in After EffectsÔ to be able to correctly project this."

He started the project in December and completed the animation sequence by the end of January, with an additional month to completely re-render to include the dome.

Not too long ago, CG animators were, for consistency sake, stuck with one high-end 3D graphics suite. Now, with more capable suites maturing that can produce work that is visually almost indistinguishable, that limitation is gone and much more flexibility is available. This allows collaborations that would have been difficult to achieve in the past.

Frank Cords and Elite Imaging can be reached at:
www.elite-imaging.com

Jeff Meyers can be reached at:
jmeyersfx@fuse.net

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