Talking about growth and development in the technological industry, many people don’t know how right they are. In fact, people are now moving from regular phone adverts and artificial intelligence to create their own imaginations and making them come to life.
Adverts are also taking a turn in using technology to sell their ideas and bring in revenue or earn while doing it. This is an example of how creative minds have taken to the use of technology. Animating water droplets and using them, to create a figure of their own is simply outstanding. Well, let’s see how they pulled it off.
Human Figure
The creators were able to bring up a human figure that was made from the animated water droplets. Amazing is the fact that the human figure at the very end could perform different functions that mimicked the movement of the human body i.e. it could kick, run among other human motions.
Well, many think that it is impossible without adding some drops of CGI into the water, well, for this specific Gatorade ad, the water was just pure water. All they added was a bit of animation i.e. stop motion animation to achieve the desired movement effect.
Stop Motion Animation
Stop motion animation is one of the most effective means of bringing different elements to life. Using cameras that capture the image at a specific point in time like when the foot touches the ground and stopping at that is what was done on this specific advert.
Stop motion works with high-frequency cameras that are able to capture that specific moment and therefore, the producers can then produce a figure movement from the image developed. Stop motion required that the producers be able to tap into the image developed by ensuring the water droplets formed different mimics of the human movement each at a time. Then, the images were used to develop the different human movements just like in stop animation. This can be said to be the technology that aided in ensuring that the human figure gained life and was able to exactly copy different human moves.
However, a lot of work was also put into developing the figure itself.
Add Development and Technology Used
The main aim was to develop a character for the advert that had similar capabilities just like a human being.
They wanted the water droplets character to be able to interact with its surrounding physical space and have similar actions as those of a human being. They wanted it to be able to run, kick any physical item and be able to move similar to a human being. Therefore, the challenge and work was left to those in the studio to work towards developing this specific water image.
According to one of its producers, this was not an easy job. They needed to know how to make a water character in the shape of a human being, how to ensure that it was suspended in the air and visible to the human eye before even starting to develop the ad. The second thing was to know how to freeze that specific image in midair. Therefore, they first developed an image showing where what was supposed to be and the actual image they desired. This was difficult as there was no technology then that could offer this specific image. All that was available were water nozzles that could drop many droplets at a time.
Our main challenge was changing the droplets from the nozzles into a 3D image. Therefore, the water printer was used to make the image and build all of its constituents which included the use of around 2,500 switches to ensure that the water formed the desired shape, a high-speed flash that was designed to freeze the image formed by the water droplets mid-air at a specific time or moment in space. In addition, this required a highly accurate time period of a millisecond which is quite impressive.
Time Period
Many are the times that we think these ads are easy and fast to produce. However, major work is put into producing them and ensuring that they are perfect for their intended function. This specific Gatorade ad took around eleven days in the studio to just produce it. Imagine how much work was put into bringing that idea together and who saw that water droplets can be animated and designed into a human figure? Just admiring the work is not all that enters into producing such advertisements. Changing the movement of water droplets and using them on 3D to mimic human movements could have been said to be impossible. However, with the Gatorade ad, this has just been proven to be very much possible.
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Conclusion
Each day, we battle with impossible things that have now been made possible using technology. Who could have thought water droplets could be animated or suspended midair, definitely not me. Well, if you still don’t believe, you better check it out yourself. Have the technology enlarge your creative mind and develop an advert that is out of this world just like Gatorade did.
