PEG Creative Director, Jeffrey Pritt, walks through how our team used After Effects and Cinema 4D to turn a real cell phone into an animated transition for a GE Intelligent Buildings video.

Video Transcript: 

Everyone, welcome to another episode of How It's Made here at PEG. Today, we're going to look at an interesting transit route we did for a GE video a few years back.

So let's take a look at the final product.

"The convergence of smartphones, LED lighting, and high-speed Internet access makes this..." (And one more time...) "…delayed the relative placement of people and things. The convergence of smartphones, LED lighting, and high-speed Internet access."

Very cool.

So yeah, a really unique transition. Let's take a look at how we did that.

As you might imagine, this all starts out with some green screen footage. No, he's not actually standing in that store.

As you can see, we have our green screen footage here. We've done a garbage matte on it to take out some of the parts we don't need on the outside edge, and we've kept the rest.

If you take a look at the footage, we did not, of course, 3D model that phone into his hand. He is literally throwing one of our iPhones out of frame.

A little scary, but you know—at the shoot, we basically just had somebody with pretty good hands catch that. We put some pillows around just in case. You don't want anybody running to the Apple Store after a shoot to get a phone replaced.

Once we see that phone go out of frame, let's take a dive back into our main composition. We can sort of see what's happening if we go frame by frame, which of course helps hide it.

He throws the phone, and we go from the actual footage to our 3D-modeled and rendered footage of an iPhone.

To do that, we took a reference clip and brought it into Cinema 4D. As he throws the phone, our 3D phone follows the exact same initial path and then has its own path that brings us up to that icon position.

Now, if you look closely in that final clip, one of the things you'll see is that it initially looks like a regular phone with the normal coloring—and then it becomes an icon.

So how did we do that?

We basically made one project that had all the correct coloring, and then made a secondary project with the exact same motion path. The only difference is that it exists as a pure icon coloring.

All we need to do from there is render both of those out and bring them into After Effects.

As you'll see here, this is the regular iPhone coloring, flipping and then going up. We've got some keyframes here that bring on the second iPhone look.

If we go frame by frame through just these two layers (which are not isolated), you can see the phone come up and then slowly dissolve into the icon look.

Let’s show that frame by frame with our regular footage on. The motion blur—like a lot of things in special effects—is covering the transition.

So at full speed, it looks like one smooth toss. It looks like the phone magically stops, hovers, and becomes an icon.

Pretty cool, right? A unique transition—something you don't see very often—and it was definitely eye-catching at the trade show it was used in.

That's pretty much it!

From Jeffrey here at PEG, thanks for joining us once again, and we'll see you on the next episode of How It's Made.