I got to work for Williams Racing

Happy New Year everyone!

I had two very busy last months of 2024 where I got the opportunity to create a Christmas animation for the Formula One team Williams Racing.
Such a great client to work for, and they gave me a lot of freedom to develop the look for the animation.

All the visuals were done by me in about 40 days. So I had to put most other things on hold and work long into the evenings to get it done. With a fantastic creative team on the Williams side there was very little friction in the production.

The main challenge of this project was that the characters should represent the actual drivers, Alex Albon, Franco Colapinto and head engineer James Vowels.

With the time limit I had, I chose to create the characters in 3D. That way I could keep them looking as consistent throughout as possible. But as usual, I did not want a fully 3D rendered look for the film, so I kept the characters very flat coloured and lit them with simple directional lighting to simulate a more 2D animated look.

Depending on the angle of the characters I created various texture maps for the faces that I could swap between. Rather than animating any geometry for facial expressions I relied only on drawn textures.

Probably quite a common method in video games I could imagine.

The backgrounds were all painted, sometimes paint-overs based on simple 3D block-outs I did. Building a quick representation of the scene in 3D first, especially when working with 3D characters helps to frame the shots, and it also allowed me to send something over to the client early days as I developed the edit.

Render times were minimal for this look, so that is always something I strive towards. There is nothing worse than finalizing a project and having render farm issues and technical problems to deal with. All the 3D assets here were exported within minutes so that made the comping process really pleasant as I could re-render bits easily if needed.

How has the start of the year been for you guys? Busy on some animation projects?

SEASON'S GREETINGS FROM WILLIAMS RACING | A Christmas Story (YouTube)