Task – to bring to life idea of creative agency ALL CAPS for project “30 minutes counts”: regular reading grows and shapes us as personalities. It is reading promotion campaign, created for ambitious national initiative Knygos tauta.

Our solution – to match book with human and show in cinematic way how book pages become portrait of personality. Idea is simple – in direct meaning to show message: you read, you turn pages, and all this becomes your identity, part of your personality portrait.

What is simple is not always easy to make. We had two main objects – book and human portrait. How to connect them so that clip is interesting to watch?

Starting point was thought that book gives different experiences. So through pages of one book and their turning motion we created cinematic storytelling, where different books are visualized by changing angle, perspective, point of view, dynamics, light and camera movement.

To smoothly animate hundreds of moving pages, control their turning speed and bending, and still keep natural feeling, we worked with complex rig system, which allowed fast and smooth animation process.

Biggest challenge was control of moving pages and cutting them into face profile. Profile looks good when book is turned sideways, but when pages open to camera with thin edge, face loses volume and becomes almost invisible. Also pages are full of letters, which create visual noise and make volume even harder to see. To solve this, we created procedural textures that helped combine page shape cut with pushing text away from cut line. Cleaner lines helped to keep clear volume of portrait.

Fun part was search for more interesting angles, combining camera movement and light. Camera flying through book and possibility to slowly move between closing pages became like small space odyssey – real journey that changes habits, into new “self”, which at the end of clip is formed from book pages.