Karcher Design

(October 2007)

When San Diego-based creative firm Karcher Design was tapped by corporate giant CSC to create presentation materials for its annual senior leaders conference in support of a new global initiative, it had just over four weeks lead time. To meet the challenge, Karcher Design leveraged the power and versatility of wondertouch™, particleIllusion™ to create a state-of-the art package of presentation elements, culminating in a spectacular, seven-minute motion-graphics intensive film.

Computer Sciences Corporation (CSC) is a leading global information technology services company that currently operates in more than 55 countries, employs more than 87,000 people, and serves some of the world's largest customers in industry and government. Although CSC may not conjure up a creative connection, wondertouch customer Karcher Design needed to deploy all the tools in its arsenal to quickly meet the deadline and create elements that would motivate CSC's top brass attending the conference from around the world.

"We faced considerable motion graphics effects and deadline challenges on the CSC project," said Christopher Karcher, president/creative director, Karcher Design. "Our initial design concepts incorporated curving spiral lines and circles that we wanted to animate from two- to-four minutes in length that would morph into new shapes and patterns in an organic way.

"We looked at other 2D/3D applications but found them too complicated to learn or simply took too long to generate our ideas. Once we started experimenting in particleIllusion we immediately realized the power of its real-time rendering capabilities to quickly create and customize the animated elements we envisioned. This creative freedom was a wonderful change for us as it allowed a fluid interaction with our designs that many of us only experienced in traditional art forms such as painting, filmmaking and ceramics" he added.

For the conference program content, the Karcher creative team (comprised of two animators, an art director and creative director) successfully conceived and delivered more than 30 branded identity elements. These elements included animations, multi-layered high-definition motion graphics and high-definition still images, which were also used for print, electronic signage and presentation materials. The motion elements were integrated with high-definition video footage, produced by San Diego based Loma Media, and included interviews with key CSC executives and top tier customers from over six countries. The end product brought to life a one-of-a-kind wide screen motion picture experience entitled, "Positioning for Growth". The seven-minute film was displayed to the senior level executives in attendance on a 50-foot wide, Vista Systems "Spyder" projection system at 1080i with a 3.3:1 aspect ratio.

"The CSC project was unique in that the animations we created were for large projection display and needed to loop," said Karcher. "Although the videos were rendered in 1080i, most of the components were mastered in 4K resolution to cost effectively support their usage in print and other extremely high resolution applications.

"In addition, since many of the animation elements involved time remapping, using particleIllusion we were able to render design elements at very high frame rates, and create effects that were fast and energetic but would transition to slower moving and poetic wherever needed; 300 frames per second or more. The software also flexibly integrated with other design elements created in Maxon's Cinema 4D, and allowed us to adjust the timing and energy of the design later in the process in Adobe After Effects," adds Karcher.

About Karcher Design

Karcher Design is a creative firm specializing in consumer and business-to-business design and image branding, interactive design and motion media. The company partners with leading business clients, agencies and PR firms including Sony, Qualcomm, DirecTV and PBS. For additional information, please visit, http://www.karcherdesign.com.