Fortem Technologies
Fortem Technologies is a relatively new company that primarily focuses on drone and radar security. They create systems that detect threatening activity for various facilities, and automously launch drones to defend against the threat. They needed a video to illustrate this concept to potential buyers and investors. My role in the project was to art direct the illustrations and storyboards, and then produce the animations.
The Process:
The client provided a script which we used to create the storyboards. I went through the script and made some recommendations and a few things were adjusted accordingly. Jordan Stewart is an illustrator on my team at EKR. He created the storyboards based on the script and I would review and make necessary adjustments before each round of client presentations.
Once the storyboards were complete the illustrations were created. Jordan Stewart produced the majority of the illustrations using Adobe Stock. I created a few other illustrations, and produced all the 3D models.
I took all the approved creative assets and using various animating methods and techniques, produced the two following videos.
3D Drone Hunter
The style of the Fortem videos needed to appear 2D. There were many instances that many different angles of the drones would need to be shown though which would be difficult to do in 2D. I used a 3D environment and build a simplified drone that could be rendered to appear 2D.
Particle Simulations
While creating the fortem video, there were many different effects that had to be used to create unique results. To create depth when simulating drone explosions, I had to create multiple layers of particles that interacted with each other. I added glowing effects to the fire layers, and kept the smoke layers as flat as possible.
Sound Effects
One of the most crucial aspects in tieing the video together was creating convincing sound effects. My primary tool to do this was using cubase. I used a variety of sounds effects from sources including AudioJungle, SoundSnap, Sounds.com, Soundly, and I created a few of my own synthesizers using Native Instruments to create some of the needed electronic sounds. Everything was mixed in cubase to allow for a visual production environment.
