Framestore and Audible create unique animation for digital cube in Times Square.
After joining forces on a successful TV campaign, Audible.com approached Framestore's Design Department, enlisting the team to imagine a 15-second animation to be displayed on a digital cube screen in Times Square.
The idea was to create an animation that would illustrate a single audiobook genre using a smartphone's headphone chords. For this particular project, the theme was science fiction.
The challenge was choreographing an animation based on two square screens that met at 90-degree angles and were wrapped around the corner of a building. The team had to find a way to tell the same story on both individual screens while also developing a way to do something unique with the merging corner, keeping it interesting for anyone viewing from that angle.
Maryanne Butler, Framestore's head of design in New York, explains, “The brief was both exciting and challenging. We came up with the idea of creating an alien face made up of two halves that would join in the middle for a quick 'blink'. The result was fun, and seeing the piece in Times Square was an added bonus."
Designers Zack Lydon and Dan Solomon created the alien and spaceship images along with the animation, which was hand-drawn in Adone’s Flash, traced using Illustrator curves, and then imported and converted in Side Effects’ Houdini. Head of 3D Commercials (New York) David Mellor translated the animation curves into fully rendered 3D chords attached to a modeled CG phone, bringing the project to life.
View the animation at: http://www.framestore.com/work/audible-times-square-billboards.