Riding our Unicorns to Valhalla.

All the radness.

Uber

Uberversary

Client: Uber
Design, Direction, Animation, Composite

Celebrate your Uberversary

Uber wanted to celebrate the milestones their customers reach in a new way. Traditionally, when you use Uber for 4 years for instance, you get an email of appreciation. To bolster these accomplishments, they came up with the idea of bring those milestones to life visually. To do that, they commissioned the lovely and talented Adriana Mora Martínez to design a city with buildings made of sculptural numbers like monuments. Depending on the milestone, that particular monument will be sent to you as a number to brighten your day. We helped the team bring each accomplishment to life with these fun looping gifs and videos customers could enjoy with each email they received.

Reference

Adriana Mora Martínez creates these wonderful shape based sculptural compositions in 3d. They are colorful and bold, but lit naturally and so pretty and joyful. they were a wonderful starting point inspirationally for a city landscape that could fit perfectly with what the Uber rider experience could be.

Bringing it to Life

To help bring these to life, our first step was to do lighting, texturing and look dev. Right out of the gate, our first instinct narratively was to start close up so viewers would emotionally invest in the car ride. Then, shot by shot but quickly, the camera pulls back to reveal the number within the animation. This element of surprise felt like an exciting way to engage viewers. Our first step to figure out that was a design phase exploring angles and looks.

Our immediate instinct was to light each scene in a photorealistic way using natural HDRI's and a lot of reflections on the cars and scenes. To help create a sense of intimacy, we played with the scale of light so the shadows were longer and softer. This complimented what we were doing narratively with the close up to wide story arcs really well. To achieve this, we worked mostly in Maxon Cinema4d and Redshift to render.

Previz

Once we had developed the look and storyboards for how we wanted these animations to move, our next step was previs. We laid out rough blockings of what each of the animations would look like in terms of camera moves, timing, the path that the car drives. These took many rounds to evolve, but it gave us and our client a great sense of how these would come to life.

Celebrating our Uberversary

From here it was a lot of lighting, rendering, animation finesse and compositing to get to the final look. We are thrilled with how these came out and are looking forward to them being shared with you on your "Uberversary".

A special thank you to Adriana Mora Martínez and the Uber team for having us along to help.