Chewy MAI UI VFX Shot
Project
During our collaboration with Chewy, we had the pleasure of contributing to various projects, including social media and commercials. This specific project involved creating a social ad for ordering pet medication. Typically, Chewy’s art department provided us with design files, assets, reference footage, and raw footage. Our task was to animate the mockup app designs to appear as if they were being used in real life. The screen replacements were composited using Adobe After Effects for seamless integration into the ad.
Team & Roles
Chris Dykes – Motion Graphics | Visual Effects
Ashley Targonski – Producer
July 2021
Category
Tools
MOTION TRACKING & Screen RePLACEMENT
For the MAI UI Ad project, we were tasked with animating the provided UI graphics and tracking the phone in the original footage to add these animations. Due to significant motion blur and the phone moving in and out of the frame, we needed a more robust tracking solution than Adobe After Effects’ camera tracker. We used Mocha AE for its planar tracking capabilities, allowing us to extract data and attach the UI graphics effectively. Mocha AE also assisted with rotoscoping the thumb’s motion to composite it over the UI animation. The final composite includes raw footage, UI animation, reflection pass, shadow pass, and the rotoscoped thumb, as shown in the GIF.
RAW Footage
This is the raw footage provided by Chewy. Later, we received a color-corrected version for use in our graphic composite. The original footage of the phone included markers to assist with tracking and points for the talent to reference where they would be tapping buttons in the final video.
MAI UI Animation
Chewy’s art department created the UI graphics for the screen replacement in the final video, and Grand Skeem Creative animated these graphics. Here is the animated UI we used.