Orbiscope: Xicare
Client: Orbiscope
Role: Producing video
Orbiscope is a chemical company developing SMA based (co)polymers. They have developed a product called Xicare, which allows particles to be dispersed in water, instead of oils, allowing for more sustainable cosmetic products. For this product, they wanted a visualisation showing how it works.
Orbiscope had created a PowerPoint presentation outlining how the video should go, together with the lines for the voice over. I worked together with Orbiscope to rewrite the script for the voice over to fit in planned length for the video and to be more in line with the goals that Orbiscope had for the project.
Given that the product is a polymer, we needed some way of showing these molecules. Originally, the idea was to abstract away the atoms and represent the polymer as a long tube. But, in some places we wanted to show the actual atoms interacting with each other, which would require the long tube to transition into a representation with the atoms. We noticed that this transition just didn’t look right, so the decision was made to have it always be the more detailed representation with the atoms.
The representation of the polymer needed to be accurate since the clients of Orbiscope that would watch the video would know quite a bit about polymers and would easily pick up on inaccuracies. But, we also could reveal any trade secrets that Orbiscope had. So, in the end we had to find the right balance between being accurate and not revealing too much.
When the idea to have the polymers be long tubes was still the direction that we were going into, I wanted to simulate the the polymers in order to create the random swaying motion that would actually happen for real. Once the decision was made to have the polymers be more detailed, I couldn’t get the simulation to work for the new style. In the final video, all of the polymers were hand animated.
From the beginning, I had the idea to have the entire video be a single long shot. The video was split up into four shots, which were then composited together into one seamless shot. For the first two of the three transitions, a simple fade between the shots was enough, but for the third transition I had a particle with Xicare polymers around it move across the screen under which I could hide a wipe.
