Pre-Production

Concept & Scripting

This project kicked off with a tight brief and a clear goal: communicate Shell | MP2 Energy’s no-cost overnight EV charging offer in a way that felt relatable, forward-looking, and aligned with both brands’ identities. Early creative talks pointed toward a 2D illustration approach, pulling from Shell’s internal visual system. But once it became clear that access to Shell’s illustration library was going to be a hurdle, we pivoted toward a clean 3D conceptual style—minimal, legible, and adaptable—built to carry both emotion and clarity through motion graphics and stylized animation.

We built the narrative around a structure anchored in everyday life—a suburban family and a familiar American home. That grounding helped make the renewable energy conversation feel immediate and personal, rather than futuristic or abstract. Shell and MP2 provided a merged color palette early: Shell’s iconic yellow and red mixed with MP2’s cooler blue and white. These brand colors shaped both the 3D lighting design and the UI overlays. We also received font and type guidelines up front, which we baked into early motion graphic layouts to maintain visual consistency from day one.

As scripting evolved, we aligned each voiceover line with specific visual sequences: a charging animation, a stylized journey of clean energy flowing to the home, and a straightforward CTA. Every line had a corresponding scene breakdown and camera plan. Even small choices—like how the garage door opened or which direction the car faced—were guided by early client feedback, making sure everything felt grounded and trustworthy.

Rapid Prototype (RP)

The RP phase started in Cinema 4D with a focus on layout and movement. We brought in a base model of a typical suburban home and reworked it to match the pitched-roof, and garage look the client was after. At the same time, we dropped in a simplified, stylized EV model. Inside the garage, we layered in real-world detail—bikes, shelves, outlets—just enough to feel lived-in without pushing toward realism.

Animation logic came next. We started with a ground-level camera pan across the EV, pulling focus to the charging port before rising into an overhead view of the house and surrounding energy grid. To show energy flow, we animated emissive materials using UV texture offsets—simple to render, easy to read. The renewable elements were built using cloners and random step effectors for subtle variety across turbines and panels.

Lighting and materials were kept flat—this wasn’t about polish yet. The goal was speed, logic, and timing. We layered in an early “charging time” UI graphic in After Effects and composited it roughly over the EV using temp tracking. To test timing, we also recorded a scratch VO pass and dropped it into a rough animatic.

Prototyping Animation Concepts

We wired up the first batch of animation logic inside Cinema 4D. Wind turbines ran on time offsets and step effectors—no keyframes, all procedural—so each one rotated out of sync with the others. Solar panels were laid out with grid cloners to fill space fast and stay aligned to the house’s aesthetic.

Electricity flow was handled with UV-scrolling emissive textures. It kept the pipeline light and efficient while still clearly showing motion. We also mocked up interface elements—charging rings, energy flow overlays—and composited those in After Effects on top of the RP renders. These pieces helped us prove the visual hierarchy and guide the viewer’s attention early on.

Materials stayed basic, cameras stayed unbaked, and lighting was neutral. We front-loaded the camera paths intentionally, locking in every transition—from the close-up in the garage to the fly-out over the energy field—so we’d have stable anchor points for post-built motion graphics and callouts later.

Client Feedback Shaping Direction

The client played a hands-on role during RP and helped lock down structure fast. One key ask was to adjust the house design. The original model leaned too modern, so we pulled back—added a pitched roof, tweaked the driveway, and replaced sleek facades with more conventional siding. Another note focused on the EV. They wanted the charge port located in the rear-left panel, matching Tesla’s placement exactly. These changes weren’t cosmetic—they helped anchor the animation in the real world and built viewer trust.

The client wanted to strike a tone between clarity and a more inviting, warmer feel. That balance drove our lighting direction and informed how UI elements would be layered in later phases.

Importantly, the client approved the RP quickly so we could avoid Shell’s full marketing review cycle. That decision let us lock creative and push forward into optimization and render prep with confidence and alignment.

Style Choices and Reasoning

We went all-in on a stylized 3D look with structured motion graphics—designed to explain the benefit clearly and reinforce the brand story without overloading the visuals. Realism was purposefully minimized. Every 3D model—from the house to the turbines—was simplified for readability. Surfaces were flat, lighting was neutral, and nothing in the scene competed with the core message. That gave us a clean base to layer in text, graphics, and animated callouts without clutter.

Color was strategic. The environment stayed muted to let Shell’s yellow and MP2’s blue stand out. Yellow drove focus on the EV and UI buttons. Blue marked energy flows and key text overlays. Every motion graphic was treated as an embedded visual element—tied to 3D space, softly glowing, and pre-planned for real estate during layout.

Typography followed Shell and MP2 brand standards from frame one. That alignment ensured visual consistency across platforms and made the final render work harder in paid and owned channels.

Every design choice was built around clarity, confidence, and speed—delivering a message that was technically accurate, brand-aligned, and easy to act on.

Production (Full Production / FP)

Look Development

With the RP approved, we moved into full production with a clear mandate: maintain the visual clarity we’d already locked while elevating material detail, lighting precision, and scene polish across every frame. The first move was replacing placeholder shaders with custom production materials. For the EV, we built a brand-specific yellow lacquer—calibrated with controlled gloss and subtle Fresnel reflection—to match Shell’s tone without tipping into hyperrealism. Around it, we applied soft off-whites and midtone grays to the garage, driveway, and house exterior, using brushed-metal accents on the garage door for a clean, high-contrast foundation that would support motion graphic overlays.

Lighting was rebuilt from scratch with a daylight rig. A soft-shadowed directional sun gave scenes primary shape and contrast. A tuned HDRI dome brought ambient lift and subtle blue reflection. Inside the garage, light planes added warmth to ground the space emotionally. This setup gave us consistent exposure across all five scenes and kept the UI overlays readable no matter the viewing angle. Using light linking and bounce control, we found the balance between image depth and surface clarity—no blown-out highlights, no murky interiors.

Every scene composition was tightened. We optimized object placement to flow with the motion path, trimming visual clutter while keeping just enough depth cues to anchor the EV spatially. All shaders were vetted in Redshift, with wear maps dialed way down to avoid noise. We added bump-normal hybrids on the driveway concrete for light texture and faint seams on the garage walls—just enough to feel real without looking weathered. Clean conceptual, start to finish.

Design & Animation

All animation was layered over the locked RP camera moves. The energy flow effect got an upgrade too: we swapped placeholder masks for production shaders using emissive gradients and UV animation embedded inside the cable geometry.

Wind turbine animation was handled through randomized Time effectors, with slight variations in spin speed across the field—enough to suggest wind variability without triggering full-blown simulations. Camera moves were cleaned up with spline-based paths and eased keyframes to smooth transitions. The critical garage-to-aerial shot was engineered to resolve at a precise angle for post integration. We baked transforms mid-shot, then interpolated between two separate camera rigs using motion blur as a bridge.

We set tracking nulls throughout the scene to lock compositing targets. These included the EV’s charge port, the solar inverter’s physical location, and the driveway’s grid center (used for the animated clock overlay). All nulls were exported via Cineware with baked animation, ensuring tight, frame-accurate overlay placement downstream in After Effects.

Scene optimization was critical to render efficiency. All repeat assets—solar panels, turbines—were instanced. Render settings were fine-tuned: high sampling for hero surfaces like the EV paint and power trails, adaptive sampling for everything else. Motion blur was selectively applied—off for any scene with motion graphics, on for wide camera pulls and turbine-heavy shots to preserve realism.

Render passes included object masks, and emission channels, giving us maximum control in comp. Every motion graphic overlay was tied to a 3D null for spatial consistency and tracked manually when needed.

Style Choices and Reasoning

We kept the visuals clean and legible on purpose. No smoke, no particles, no fog. The animation had to communicate clearly on web, mobile, and large screens—so we stripped out anything that might distract from the energy story or confuse the user’s eye. Every visual was there for a reason.

Color accuracy was essential. The lighting system was tuned to maintain the brand hues—Shell’s yellow and MP2’s blue—regardless of lighting shifts or HDRI reflections. Material specular settings were manually adjusted to avoid color distortion or off-brand reflections.

The hybrid style—simple 3D with layered motion graphics—was a deliberate decision. We anchored every UI element and energy animation to physical scene objects: the port, the driveway, the inverter. That spatial grounding gave the viewer intuitive context, so we didn’t have to rely on callouts or explanations. It just made sense visually.

Collaboration & Revisions

The RP phase did the heavy lifting on narrative and layout, so full production was all about refining the visual and pacing. We had one internal review cycle where we tightened a few things: dialed back driveway contrast, adjusted overlapping elements around the UI, and tweaked the EV’s orientation during the top-down pullout. All easy changes—locked quickly.

Client-side, there were almost no revisions. That was by design: the pre-production alignment paid off. The only note was to make sure the house still read as “residential” and not too modernist—which we’d already baked into the model back in RP. With everything aligned, we hit render prep without any slowdowns.

Post-Production & Delivery

Final Compositing & Color Grading

Post kicked off with a structured, layered approach inside After Effects. Every Redshift render pass—beauty, emission, object buffers—was pulled in and broken out per scene. We separated key elements like the EV, environment, emissive flows, and sky for full control during grading. This modular setup let us dial in specific corrections without affecting overall brand color consistency.

Glow effects were added surgically. We used glow to amplify the energy pulses in the cable and surrounding electricity paths but tuned them carefully to avoid blowing out the scene. Charging overlays—like the real-time dial and time bar—were animated as vector assets and motion-tracked directly to the EV’s charging port and windshield. UI layering got detailed attention: using exported luma and object masks from Cinema 4D, we could composite overlays on top of the EV geometry when needed, preserving clarity without visual crowding.

Color grading emphasized legibility and brand control. We applied targeted curves and exposure tweaks to normalize contrast between indoor and outdoor scenes. The goal was keeping Shell yellow, MP2 blue, and red CTA highlights locked in their approved hue ranges, no matter the lighting shifts. With selective color tools, we boosted saturation only where it mattered—preserving brand accents while letting backgrounds stay clean and neutral. Shot-to-shot color matching was handled manually to keep the garage, driveway, and wide aerials flowing visually.

Infographics, UI Overlays, Data Visualization

All infographic elements were built in After Effects using native shape layers and expressions. The “Free Charging Hours” dial, the grid path from renewable sources, and the “Sign Up Today” CTA were designed to feel embedded—matching the space and moving with the camera via null tracking. Shape layers were driven by radial wipes and stroke animations to communicate percentage fill and directional power flow, giving data a kinetic, natural feel.

The energy path from solar and wind fields to the house was animated using directional strokes with pulse effects layered on top. These were anchored to 3D nulls from Cinema 4D, letting the overlays conform to scene depth and motion without warping or misalignment.

Typography followed Shell and MP2 brand standards to the pixel. Fonts were scaled against a consistent grid, with enough padding and motion easing to keep type elegant across devices. Transitions avoided hard pop-ins—every text move was eased to align with the voiceover rhythm and pacing.

Brand Consistency

Shell’s brand identity was held firmly throughout compositing. Every logo was given the correct spacing, alignment, and positioning. MP2’s branding came through via color schemes, UI treatment, and CTA voice—subtle but always present. Motion graphics matched the brand’s tone: confident, calm, forward-looking. No flashy transitions, no unnecessary effects—just clean, purposeful movement.

Late-stage feedback from Shell focused on small refinements: repositioning logos for better mobile readability and adjusting UI paths to feel more visually balanced. These were handled precisely, with pixel-level corrections to align layout with brand specs.

Delivery

The final video was delivered as a 1080p file with audio and all compositing fully baked. The client approved a single locked version for web, internal use, and embedded playback. Every CTA, overlay, and logo treatment was final inside the exported master. The file was designed to be dropped into Shell and MP2’s digital channels without additional platform-specific prep.

Transcript:

MP2 Energy has the first free electric vehicle charging program in Texas.

Just schedule your EV to charge during the free hours, and the rest of your electricity will come from 100% renewable resources at a fixed rate.

The MP2 electric vehicle charging program.

Sign up today for a greener tomorrow.