Forever looking at new ways to bring architectural projects to life, Liverpool design firm Uniform draws inspiration from a comic book film to help visualise a student accommodation project in Barcelona.
University accommodation was never this plush in our day, but 22@ The District, located in Barcelona, is the latest for young students looking for a high spec campus life in the Spanish city.
One of three Nido (meaning ÙnestÝ in Spanish) developments, it joins two London-based builds. The promotional visualisations are brought to life through a comic strip of events by Liverpool-based design firm Uniform, and the project adds the vibrant cartoons of external artist Jamie McKelvie.
ýGiven the brief, a simple fly-through would have been adequate, however, Uniform wanted to take a more creative approach to ensure the films engaged with the youthful target market,¯ says Laurie Jones, creative director at Uniform. ýThe films needed to appeal to an international audience with potential residents residing all over the world.¯
The team worked with 3ds Max and V-Ray for all the 3D elements, which were then composited in Fusion. For the comic elements Photoshop was used for re-touching, followed by AfterEffects for merging the 2D and 3D, and finally premier pro to edit it all together.
So, how was the experience of creating a fly-through comic book film? ýIt was pretty straightforward,¯ explains Charlie Pastor, lead 2D artist. ýThe only slight technical challenge was the aligning of the composition of the characters for the 16:9 frame of the animation with the changing ratio of the comic frames. Once we got our heads around that it was easy.¯
