The Company Behind Some Toyota/Scion Ads

Those cars you’ve seen in commercials driving down imaginary highways likely aren’t real. They are probably creations of corporate artists, like Ann Arbor residents Michael Watts and Aaron Schwartz, who regularly use 3-D technology to create animations for recognizable clients like Toyota and Jeep.

The business

Watts, a former freelance digital artist, and Schwartz, a former product designer and University of Michigan alumnus, founded Hook Studios LLC in Ann Arbor almost exactly a year ago.

The idea is to build interactive games or promotional animations to tell a story about a product.

“Companies want the product to look real, but have it behave in an exceptionally extraordinary way,” Schwartz said.

Their downtown studio is a small space with “planetarium blue” walls and an eclectic collection of decorative knickknacks. More often than not, Watts and Schwartz can be found by the desks in their loft office trading ideas and manipulating 3-D images into animations, games and product illustrations for corporate clients.Recently, they created a series of interactive graphics for touch-screen kiosks for the North American International Auto Show to tell passersby about the low environmental impact of Toyota’s cars. In 2007 they created a computer-animated commercial featuring a virtual version of the Prius driving passed digital wind turbines.

They are currently working on projects for Hyatt Hotels and Resorts and Nestle.

The technology

Hook Studios relies on various 3-D design programs, such as LightWave 3D, Modo and Softimage|XSI, to create their images and animations.

“You can’t just choose one program. … You have to stay flexible and you have to stay on top of the technology because certain programs are better at doing certain things.

XSI is better at doing dynamic cloth simulations, but Lightwave is very quick and inexpensive and easily accessible so on simpler projects we’d probably just use Lightwave,” Schwartz said.

In the case of a game Hook made featuring the Toyota Tundra, Watts and Schwartz used a common design technique that fits hundreds of tiles designed with different landscape features like trees or roads. Those tiles are fit together like puzzle pieces using LightWave to allow the Tundra to drive through the rugged virtual terrain.

Sometimes companies will send computer-aided design or CAD files to the designers with the hollow shape of the newest possible product design, like in the case of Nestle trying out a new bottle design. The two manipulate that shape until it appears as sleek as any new product found in a convenience store cooler.

“Part of the reason we’re so captivated by 3-D is that its constantly changing and evolving, we’re forced to learn new technologies and we’re very dedicated to it to actually progress and get better and develop,” Watts said.

The future

Hook Studios just launched its Web site in the past month and hired three part-time designers.

Watts and Schwartz say they hope to move into bigger projects, such as national advertising campaigns. For now, they’re building a reputation with work on smaller promotions for big-name companies.

Pixar might just be the pinnacle, but they aren’t aiming to create an enormous company, Watts said.

“The goal is being able to produce great work for clients and to be able to have the freedom to produce products in-house that are to our own liking. That’s our ultimate goal is to have a team that can work together in both faculties.”

Source

No related posts.