Jelly Beans Series

<aside> 💡 Watch the series of videos I’m referring to in the links below:

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I started creating a series of shots back in 2022, with jelly beans as the theme. It was a great way to push myself to learn advanced motion graphics in Houdini, improve my workflow and showcase my work.

Each shot was designed to explore a different technical challenge and still be flexible enough to accommodate art direction changes. The first ones were aimed at precisely controlling the motion of jelly beans so that they could arrange in different shapes while interacting in a bullets simulation. The final shots would place the jelly beans in the context of smoke and liquid simulations.

I created a moodboard on Pinterest to capture references of the materials these sweets are made of, as well as to collect different advertising and photographic pieces featuring the subject that could serve as inspiration. Then I created a storyboard with rough layouts, copy and colors for each shot.

Artistically, I decided for a photorealistic look with physically plausible movements which are impossible to achieve in-camera. With that, I wanted to prove that some product shots are only possible with the help of computer-generated images.

I aimed for a minimalistic look in all frames, highlighting the colorful heroes of the shots - the jelly beans. I appreciate how clarity and focus empowers the message and simplify what is a challenging work. To achieve these qualities, the lighting had to look commercial, clear and diffuse like the one made in studios. I put textures in the lights to mimic real studio lights. It has to look simple with a strong key light, but I often needed more than three lights. This was necessary to address small issues in specific parts of the frame. In some shots there were lights only for creating the background gradient, or different lights for the jelly beans closest and far from the camera.

Regarding color, the base palette was taken from Bola Studio’s logo, which is mostly a tetradic color scheme. Besides it, in the first shots the sweets are shown in different paletes to match different themes like Christmas, water, a country flag and the logo of my studio. The voice-over would complement this idea, pointing out that you can pick the color you want of jelly beans to match your brand or theme. The presence of this number of color palettes could ruin a design, so I decided to keep a white background while showcasing these diverse colors. I only started changing the background colors once the color palette was stable in the second half of the shots.

The most challenging shots are the ones with the jelly beans falling into a whirlpool of milk and caramel. These two shots took about two months to be completed because I wanted a very specific look for the whirlpool. And I didn’t want the splashes created by the falling beans, or the chaotic nature of a FLIP simulation, to destroy this look. The solution was to create layers of art direction based on a dynamic mask. The mask separated which parts of the whirlpool would follow my art direction for the whirl and which would be distorted by the splashes.

I wish the liquid simulation had more resolution so that the splashes could have thinner sheets and tendrils. But I would need more computing power than what I have to achieve this look. After creating these time-consuming effects, I’m more inclined to create sets of tools in Houdini to help make other shots like these faster in the future.

With this project I achieved some advanced effects that not many motion designers have experience to do. It brought me closer to a specialist position in these types of shots. It also proved that challenging personal projects help accelerate growth.