Yeti Pictures' Tony Zagoraios spoke about the team's source of inspiration for the Summertime project, shared how the environments for the animation were created, and discussed the workflow behind making cars.
Introduction
I'm Tony Zagoraios, motion designer/director and founder of Yeti Pictures. I started 3D almost 12 years ago, by doing personal projects in order to express my own point of view. Back then, there were no online sources, so I taught myself only by reading books and doing experimental stuff. I was lucky enough to gain the attraction of big clients like Vice, Virgin, and Google and work with them as a freelance director/motion designer. After that, I was ready to build my own team, since I knew that being on your own has limitations.
Yeti Pictures
Yeti Pictures is a 3D/Motion Design studio in Greece. We are a team of 7 artists, with different skill sets, and always trying to improve the quality of our work. We love doing from photorealistic CG stuff to Cartoonish/ Stylised 3D animations, in order to keep diversity in our stuff and never get bored. Yeti has done opening titles for Netflix, TV Branding for most of the Greek TV stations, Game Trailers for EA, and a bunch of tv commercials for clients like Microsoft, Dell, Nissan, etc.
The Summertime Project
For the last two years, it has been almost a habit, to do a personal project just before we leave for our summer vacations. We love cars and speed, so we thought it could be cool to create a cartoon variation of different cars that people use for their holidays. A family car, a jeep, and a motor home.
We started by doing a few rough concepts and then finalized their style, so they have consistency among them, regarding shape and look. We mostly took a look into cartoon movies and comics, to get cool ideas/inspiration and finally created a mood board of stylized cars. Finally, we kept a small number of refs, cause most of the time huge style boards are giving us a headache.
Environments
We love doing CG environments and Summertime was another chance to explore how we can blend photorealistic textures/objects with stylized props and cars. We firstly collected refs from paintings and real-world photos but also found a few motion design projects that did something similar.
Three out of the four scenes were built just by altering refs and doing rough blocking improvisations, while the motor home scene was based on a sketch we came up with. Texturing and modeling were done entirely in Cinema 4D and for the rendering we always use Octane. The main challenge was to keep the balance between the cartoonish cars and photorealistic environments, something that was solved by adding smaller design elements and props into the scene.
Cars
The cars were our biggest challenge. Even though it seemed easy at first, we came up with a few problems, since they were too different. So we had to find a common language that would make a family car, a jeep, and a motor home look aesthetically united.
We kept the idea of altering the height of the car and distorting it a bit, along with the curvy/rounded edges plus the contrast of small wheels or huge wheels. We used Octane for the shading but also drew a big amount of stickers in Photoshop/Illustrator, in order to give a comic/cartoon look. We love adding small details in most of our projects along with hidden messages.
Rendering and Animation
All of the cars have been animated by using custom rigs that we built in Cinema 4D. Due to the nature of each car, the animation should be different, taking into consideration its size, weight, and ground/scene, plus the action it was taking place. All of the scenes are using direct sunlight, with the addition of smaller area lights in order to emphasize specific spots in the scene.
The post-production was done entirely in After Effects, but to be honest nothing fancy, just a few color grading layers and Crypto Passes, so we can tweak colors or levels. Finally, the cloud layers were also done in Photoshop and placed as a background layer in After Effects.
Main Challenges
Personal projects are always fun, where the team is getting closer and enjoying the process without worrying about client feedback or deadlines. The main challenge beyond the technical or aesthetic problems was to create a short humorous film about summer, that people would enjoy and laugh at. I think that the lesson we learned is pretty close to the advice I would give to fellow artists: Whatever you do with love and passion brings up, the best version of yourself. Don't worry about the technical stuff, just focus on the story you wanna share with the people out there.