FIRE ROVER OVERVIEW

Directed By: Visioned Media

Design & Animation: Adam Zimmer

I had the amazing opportunity to team up with two incredibly talented friends from college who started their own production company, Visioned Media. Scott & Alex approached me with their client Fire Rover who was looking for an updated website and an animated explainer for their landing page.

 

This was a blast of a project to work on, and Scott & Alex were unbelievable through every step of the production!

 

Be sure to check out the process down below.

 

 

THE PROCESS

Visioned Media & Fire Rover had already settled on a near final script when you contacted me, and I began the story boarding process. I came up with a few different loosley hand drawn storyboards, to begin putting the pieces together. Once we all agreed on the overall storyboard and key frames we moved on to the visual style.

Originally Fire Rover was thinking about going with a “hand drawn” style whiteboard video. They liked the minimal, yet bold colors of that style. We used that idea as the basis for our style development. We decided against the “hand drawn” approach, instead opting for a cleaner and modern vector style. While still keeping the inspiration of the whiteboard there, using a white background that allowed the blacks and red to pop out.

With the storyboards all figured out and a style settled on, there was nothing left to do other than animate and bring this to life. The biggest technical hurdle I had to figure out was how to create the fire and foam that was in this video. We did not have time for cel animation, so I began exploring the internal particle generator in After Effects and eventually found a way to use that plus the auto trace feature as a base for the fire and foam. From there I figured out a way to outline all the different shapes and blobs of the autotraced footage with a black stroke. Along with this we also wanted the ending scene to involve the Fire Rover rotating from a profile view to a front view. I accomplished this by building a 3D Fire Rover in After Effects using shape layers.