Animated Inspiration: Animated Evolution

Here's a bank commercial with animated origami animals. There's two things of note here--one that I focused on and the other that was pointed out by a friend.

One: the denominations of the bills are increasing through every stage of transition from one model to the next, so kudos to the animators for the attention to detail (and thanks J'Ben for pointing this out). It's a very nice and subtle touch to both the models and the film.

And two: after the first model, the animators use a series of moving camera angles and close-ups on a particular body part to mask the transitions from one figure to another. I'm assuming that this is done due to the excessive complexity of one paper origami figure folding and refolding into another more complex origami figure. It looks like one of those "we can do it, but not in the time and budget allotted for this project, so let's try this instead" moments in filmmaking. And I'm not knocking it. It works and works well for this animation. I have to think that the animators went through several renditions of this commercial as they had this incredible, very complex idea and needed to bring it down to the realm of what they could achieve with the resources they had. My first year film at R.I.T. was like that. I had a great idea for a motion comic (before motion comics were the big thing) but lacked the skills to pull it off in the time we had for the project. Ultimately though, through an honest evaluation of my abilities (and a little tough love), Erik helped me choose a concept for a short animation that was better suited for both my skill level and the time we had to complete the project. 'The Chameleon' ended up winning second place at that year's SMTPE/RAVA festival, so Erik's opinion certainly held true on that project.