TwentyFortyOne Blog

Raise your hand if you’ve never played the old 8 bit Oregon Trail game…. No one…? Exactly! We all played that game in elementary school!! Well now the Swedish roof rack company, Thule, has brought back a piece of nostalgia! The objective is to get from Chicago to a music fest in California without showing up early or breaking down. I was penalized 500 points (!!!) for arriving early, but at least I made it… Only got like 1100 points though.. Make sure to talk to people along the way and see the sights! CLICK TO PLAY

This is a great example of how someone took a played out idea and executed it perfectly. The two things that work for this piece are the lighting on the car (hard to match the scene without HDRI probes) and the motion capture they did for the movement of the “robot”.



I believe this ad was created by the same company, but for a different car. The studio that created the spot is a Canadian-based firm called The Embassy Visual Effects, Inc. There is a great write-up on how they accomplished the task HERE.

You can’t animate 3D objects that well, so you have to put a guy in a wetsuit-looking thing with about 150 infrared reflectors on it whilst being recorded by special infrared cameras… NERD ALERT!

Videos like this always inspire me to continue learning motion graphics and 3D. However, it’s also videos like this that make me sigh at the thought that I may never be this Judo…