autodesk go beyond - behind the scenes

Early in 2023 Autodesk came to Mile 80 with an interesting brief: a video that's part of a program targeting the tech community, aiming to highlight the value of platform transformation and promote unity among Autodesk's 7,000 employees across various engineering disciplines, product management, and design through a video presentation.

'nuff said. We've crafted a highly demanding 3D animation, considering the limited time available for execution. This was our first 3D cartoon animation, and we celebrated🥳 this milestone with a behind-the-scenes video. I envisioned a concept, and I wanted to see it in action.

THE CONCEPT

I'm a big fan of 'on-screen' movies like Missing (2023), Don't F**k With Cats: Hunting an Internet Killer (2019), or Searching (2018), and I've always wanted to create a story in this style. During the research phase, I also came across a making-of video for a comic book. I love the narration and the fast-paced style they chose to present how they made the comic book. So that's the combo, that's the plan🦸.

The storyline was easy to come up with. The Go Beyond story is about multiple departments at Autodesk managing to work together for a greater scope. And I knew that's the same story I wanted to tell through this video as well. I think this is the only project at Mile 80 where the entire team was involved in the production. We were probably 10-12 active people involved in it, and my goal was to show the dynamism, the energy, and the power of communication that exists at Mile 80.


To mock up a storyline, I started by asking the team about a list of challenges we've faced, and boy, the list was long.-

Storyline

Mood boards

3D looks (characters and environments)

Scenes creation in Autodesk

Lightning

Character creation

Character clothes

Character animation

Recording Facial animation (mocap) and synchronization with VO

Camera movements

I've started writing the story, or you can call this script or storyboard, or whatever you want to call it. For me, it looked like this.

The next step was gathering all the screen recordings we had and deciding on the best moments from the final video that we can use. We never edit randomly; every shoot must tell a story. Therefore, finding the storyline and sound bits was quite challenging. With all the materials I gathered, I mocked up the Animatic.

This was the moment when I transferred the project to the editing and animation team, and I continued to lead it just creatively by giving feedback and suggestions. The team did an excellent job by refining and shaping it until the final form.

This is probably the most ambitious and well-executed Behind the Scenes video we've ever done at Mile 80, taking us about 2 weeks from start to finish.

And I'm very proud of it 😇