Madhappy
(3 to 4 minute read)
This highlights one component of a group project involving a social campaign for the brand Madhappy. Our team developed a campaign that revolved around the brand's social initiatives surrounding mental health, as we felt there was an opportunity to market that in more depth.
Our campaign was required to revolve around animation specifically, and we chose to create deliverables using both 2D and 3D animation techniques that were displayed through full-length videos, as well as gifs and looping animations. The featured video was my contribution to the campaign, which I shot in the school's production studio (alongside my team) and edited using motion tracking and modelling in Cinema 4D.
The Task
For this video, we wanted to showcase both elements of "Madhappy". What initially stood out to us about the brand is that they take a different approach to mental health initiatives. Many companies often focus on the darker side of mental health (often focusing on mental illness), however, Madhappy recognizes that every single person develops and maintains mental health to some degree. As highlighted in their brand mantra, mental health is "...about the ups and downs, and everything in between."
We wanted to highlight the ups and downs of mental health in a way that felt more inclusive and optimistic, and this is where colour played an important part in our campaign.
We didn't want to highlight a specific person/gender as we wanted all audiences to be able to relate to the visuals, so we chose to use a "bubble head" that would showcase the different emotions one can feel (via colour changes). Madhappy uses a wide variety of brighter colours in their line, as well as in their current social media content, and we wanted to be able to create a reflection of that in this video.
You can see the final result in the video below.
The Process (Shooting)
The video was shot in one night at Humber's Birmingham Studios. Our team worked hard to gather props, as well as build the set. I assisted in not only shooting the piece, but also with lighting and blocking during the shoot. The use of flowers and a typewriter in our set we felt matched the dreamy and vintage feel of their existing social media.
The Process (Post-Production)
After the shoot, the VFX section of our team worked on adding the bubble head effect in post-production. My contributions to this included setting up the motion trackers, as well as modelling each of the bubbles and attaching them to the motion trackers via Cinema 4D and Adobe After Effects. Our model for this was heavily inspired by a tutorial by Sean Dove on YouTube (thank you Sean!).
From there, the colours and the transitions, as well as texturing were added in C4D as well.
Original Footage (no trackers or colour correction)
Original Footage (with motion trackers). This was a learning curve and a valuable lesson for our team for learning about positioning markers for future shoots.
Image of the model prior to the colour correction and texturing
Original Footage (no trackers or colour correction)
The process of tracking and modelling the "bubble head" for the live action video. Feel free to click on each picture above, or hover over them to learn a bit more about each step.
Conclusion
This was a campaign I was very proud to be a part of. I was fortunate to work with a hard working team, who was unafraid to push the limits of our skills, jump in to help whenever/wherever they can, and try things we'd never done before. It was also nice to be part of a more "content-focused" campaign, as in previous projects we had to focus more on analytics and research.
The overall theme of our campaign was a strong reminder that there is always more than one side to a story, and effective storytelling involves acknowledging this in order to better understand and reach them. I intend to take this approach when concepting and telling stories in my future works.