OFFSET Main Titles 2016

It’s a rare opportunity to be given such free-reign in commercial content production, but OFFSET’s desire to seek out fresh concepts and design made this collaboration so rewarding. Working closely with Mutiny Recording Studios on the sound, we were able to flex our creative muscle thanks to the open minds of the OFFSET team.

The one minute main titles takes the form of a montage of bizarre talking abstract sculptures. Loosely based on our past experiences of seeing, hearing and intellectually digesting the speakers we’ve always enjoyed at OFFSET, our ambition was to compress the main title sequence into an intensified nugget of this experience. It’s one speaker after another who’s unique take on creativity and design gives you much needed perspective on your own place in the creative universe.

Distilling that into a minute was our challenge. We’ve also had a long and somewhat obsessive relationship with motion capture and particularly facial performance capture. Using the facial capture and rigging pipeline we’d developed on past projects, we started to explore the idea of applying the speech, twitches, blinks and idiosyncrasies of the human face, to abstract visual explorations, roughly inspired by talking human heads.

As the sound was such a critical part of this idea, we collaborated closely with Mutiny here in Dublin, who created a spectacular piece of sound design. We then directed a motion capture shoot remotely through our friends at Audio Motion in the UK, to generate the facial performance data.

Our studio of 3D artists developed the wide range of colourful digital sculptures, expressing their own unique interpretation of each audio snippet or monologue. When the facial capture data started to drive the movement of the virtual sculptures, our family of slightly bizarre OFFSET heads came to life.

CREDITS

 Concept: Richard Chaney & Gavin Kelly
Creative Director: Richard Chaney
Producer: Aileen Heavey
Lead 3D: Sam Boyd
3D: Cormac Kelly, Mario Domingos & James Doherty
Tracking: Gavin Hoffman
Flame: Arron Inglis
Editor: Damien McDonnell
Sound Design and Editing: Mutiny
Motion Capture: Audio Motion