Always Working

I’ve taken a growing interest lately in “behind the scenes” videos for large budget productions. One animated video that I recently saw was a short promo for McDonalds called Always Working. It was a one minute piece made with 3D printed figures and a background full of miniature plastic trees and hills. The reddit user who posted it also included a “making of” video that I found to be very interesting. It shows all aspects of the production process, including some of the character modeling in Maya and compositing in After Effects. The reddit user was an animator on the project and also held a mini AMA (Ask Me Anything) session in the comments of the post. I think that videos like this one give an interesting glimpse of what it may be like to work as a professional animator.

3D Printed Animation

This is an example of a type of animation I had never seen before. Not 3D animation... 3D printed animation. This animation, called "Bears On Stairs" by DBLG, was created by using a 3D printer to individually print about 50 frames of a bear walking up stairs. The 3D printed bears & stairs were all placed and photographed one-by-one, then stitched together to create the animation. The result is something that I think looks much more interesting and organic than anything that could be made using CGI.
Watch a short video about how it was made here: