For those of you who are new here, I recently completed a personal project 'Unveiling the Creative Journey: Crafting a Friendsgiving Ad from Concept to Screen', and If you haven’t checked that out, I highly recommend it. 

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This is a closer look at how I created the ad that celebrates the Friendsgiving tradition of gathering with friends to celebrate Thanksgiving. 

The process of creating ads can be completed. This guide shows you the step-by-step journey from conception to the final visual below. 

LINK TO VIDEO

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Step one: Ideation and Conceptualization

I went over this in the Crafting a Friendsgiving Ad post, so I am going to keep this section short.

I wanted to create a short ad for the next holiday, which happened to be Thanksgiving. Instead of centering it around Your Family at Thanksgiving, I chose to make it about Your Chosen Family at Friendsgiving. I wanted this to be fun and completed in 1-2 weeks. 

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Step two: Storyboarding and Planning

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For the storyboarding section I will explain exactly what I did at this stage but if you are looking for a larger breakdown of ‘The Role of Storyboarding in 3d Animation’ check back in a couple of weeks for that article. It will have a lot more information about the storyboarding process than this section will. 

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Here is the storyboard that was created for this ad.

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—-INSERT IMAGE—-

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Here is a side-by-side of the storyboard and its corresponding frame from the final animation. 

You do not have to be locked into the types of shots that were in your storyboard for your final animation. I tried to stay 100% locked into what was created in the storyboard to save time. 

I wanted to take my time and play from different angles, but I also wanted to get this done in a week or two so I skipped a lot of the exploration phases to save time.

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Step 3: Setting Up in Cinema 4D

I may not have done this in this exact order but here is a list of steps:

 

1. Scene Composition and Layout
   I started by blocking out the big objects in the room. Walls, windows, tables, etc.

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2. Modeling and Elements
   After I had an idea of where everything would go, I then started to model everything. I did not model everything. I got a lot of free models from CG Trader. For the things I modeled, I will try to figure out a way to put them on this site so you can download them.

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3. Texturing and Material Application
   After I created each model, I would place it where it needed to go and then Texture it before I moved on to the next model. 

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For those of you who do not know what texturing is, check out my where I put together a list of technical terms and jargon you should circle back to from time to time if you are ever curious about what something is. 

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Creating realistic textures is something that I am not good at. So, I use a plug-in from Greyscalegorilla.

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4. Lighting Setup
   Once I had enough models placed in the scene I started working on the lighting. I used a series of Area Lights and one environment light.
   
   Lighting plays a big role in setting the Vibe and should be unique to each scene. I may do a deeper dive into the lighting for this specific project in the future where I placed the lights and why. 

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Step 4: Animation in Cinema 4D

1. Animating the Scene
   One camera was used to move throughout the scene in one continuous shot. I used one camera because I wanted to send it out to render one time.
   
   

Multiple cameras are fine and if I had more time to be patient I would have used multiple cameras. This project was on a short timeframe so I didn’t want to waste any time going through the export process for each camera.

I used a **Target Tag on the camera and used a **Null as the target, to point the camera to what I wanted to look at. 

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2. Rendering Process: Iteration and Refinement

I rendered this a total of 4 times. The first three times were rendered at very low quality to speed up **Render Times, so I can see what needs to be adjusted. These renders of the full video helped me with the timing of the voice-over and to see if I needed to adjust the camera angles. 

Once Timing and camera angles were to my liking, I rendered Single frames at key points in my storyboard to make sure the lighting looked right through the animation. I rendered these frames with higher render settings so I could get a real idea of what the final render would look like. 

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3. Final Rendering From Cinema 4D uses Redshift Renderer

I then Set up ***AOVs and rendered everything as an ***OpenEXR Sequence. I used the separate passes from the AOVs to help **Color Grade the animation in After Effects.

Step 5: Importing to After Effects

1. Importing Sequence into After Effects. 

Once the OpenEXR Sequence is rendered you can import them into After Effects and use a feature in After Effects to extract each ***Render Pass.

Step 6: Post-Production Magic in After Effects

1. Color Grading
   
   The color grading process included using two Level adjustment layers adjusting two of the AOVs, (1) Shadows and (2) Reflections. And one adjustment layer that controls the Lumetri Color.

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To see how I did this in a little more detail check out how I enhanced this Friendsgiving ad.

Step 7: Adding Audio and adjusting Timing

Voice over

I used https://elevenlabs.io/ to generate the voiceover. Now that I have the voiceover I was able to place it in the animation and use **Time Remapping to speed up or slow down the animation so the visuals match up with the voice over. 

Music

I downloaded the music a while ago from Storyblocks.

Step 8: Export to Media Encoder

Now that everything is added and looks ok, it is ready to be exported. 

After Effects has its own renderer but I export things using ***Media Encoder. Media Encoder is also an Adobe product so everything works seamlessly. 

Conclusion

Creating 3d animations is a complicated process. Almost all of these steps have multiple sub-steps. I’ll try to cover as much as possible in articles in these series. I recommend checking out the next article in the series ‘Optimizing Workflow in 3D Animation Projects’ where I go over strategies to streamline the creation process, manage resources, and optimize efficiency.  

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