FELD ENTERTAINMENT LOGO ANIMATION

Feld Entertainment was looking to bring its brand into the 3D world. It was off season from the Monster Jam TV Show and I was starting to take on more projects outside that brand within the creative department. My director, Oliver de Lantsheere, and a manager, Anthony Bohannon, approached me to create a 3D version of the FELD logo and to pitch a unique style for it.

BREAKDOWN

I wanted to explore something that utilized negative space and was heavily focused on lighting. To contrast the brilliance of a star with a dark and moody background. Threw together a mood board of various animations the three of us were interested in and I went on to work on some styleframes.

These four styleframes were my first renders to explore textures and dramatic lighting. Making the logo feel “larger than life” and playing with negative space. While these renders were the cleanest this was not what the brand team was looking for, so we went to a different route. They were looking to experiment with a more dynamic animation and play with more particles. So I went on to create the next set of styleframes.

With the focus that each star represents a day in the year, the first idea I had was how I could make each star not only feel like they are their own identity, but to create a swarm to unify them and form the logo. Using smooth, slow moving animations to make the piece more epic and really playing with those particles just to add to the environment. Z-depth took a much more active roll this time around to emphasize that personal identity for each star. I was heavily inspired by Patrick Clair’s The Man in the High Castle title sequence and was exploring with some foggy elements.

At this point critiques were suggesting that I involve an environment to more actively involve fog and create dynamic lighting. Which then I proceed to make in the next set of screenshots. Heavily inspired by Ash Thorp’s None short, I went on to explore dark environments and mess with god-rays, fog, and so on.

While it was a fun challenge it was at this point where my director suggested that instead of taking a handful of stars across notable cities and natural locations that I instead have Earth in the center of a stage. “The World is a stage” after all.

After that, we ended up just simplifying things to the point where the world is literally a stage. These are some screenshots of the final scene in C4D and Octane. Was messing around with World Machine to create a more unique landscape however with the environment out of focus and in the background it deemed unnecessary, so I just used the standard landscape tool via C4D and used z-depth. My director and I were pretty content when the concept evolved to the world being in the center of a stage. It fit the brand pretty well, and was unique compared to what usually was created in Feld Entertainment. This render was used in a few social pieces however I can’t seem to find them anywhere on the social sites… it is likely a certain hire-up turned around and changed their mind about using this animation moving forward. Also, is an animatic pass of camera movement and the direction the stars would go.