Dropbox brought in Fuzzco to reintroduce them alongside a major website redesign. Fuzzco developed the campaign, from the concept and messaging through to a storyboarded 60 second film: a tour through a series of rooms, a bit like walking through a home, with each room built around one of the new features. They approached us as their 3D partner to bring it to life. We had five weeks to design, animate and render the whole thing.

Five weeks meant the film had to be built in parallel, and luckily the "rooms" concept gave us a natural way to divide it. We took an extremely modular approach, with a cast of characters from the Dropbox universe (files, UI components, users) on one side and the "room" environments on the other. The environments could be modeled while the UI animation was already underway, and the two were brought together shot by shot.

The whole film was built procedurally in Houdini, meaning a change to a character could update automatically in every shot it appeared in. That workflow allowed us to keep responding to feedback right up to delivery without needing to rework shots from scratch.

It became a very close collaboration, with a constant back and forth between Fuzzco's design team and ours all the way to the end. Their art direction shaped every shot, Justin Colt edited the film on our side, and Julian Lahdesmaki did the sound design. Once the film was finished, Fuzzco used our assets on their own to produce the campaign's imagery and layouts.

I led the 3D production and animation of the film as the Houdini artist on the team, and I designed the modular pipeline it was built on. Nearly every part of the film passed through my hands: modeling, texturing, lighting, camera work, motion and simulation. I had support throughout from Vincent Drayne, who helped with the environments, and Jonathan Franklin, who helped with the pipeline and collaboration tools and assisted on the heavily simulated shots. Fuzzco was also an amazing resource, and consistently provided us with the campaign-level assets we needed to keep the process moving as efficiently as possible.