Thiago Carneiro

The best way to understand why a Brand would use packshot animation to display their products is to understand the limitations of traditional Packshot photography. Traditional packshot photography is still heavily used for printing advertising, but with the rise of Social Media and TV/Internet Ads, it has become obsolete fast. The reason is that it is incredibly time-consuming and challenging to shoot a commercial for a product. It requires big teams and tons of post-production. If the piece is designed already as a 2D or 3D animation, a single artist can take that task if skilled enough. That allows the client to have more creative freedom in their briefing and account for more exploration of the animation phase.

When I think about effective packaging design and pack shot animation, I think about two brands: Nike and Apple. Apple products advertising is a whole experience in itself. From the social media ADs to the unpacking experience, there's nothing like it. I believe it's an amazing showcase of how to make a Tech product look sexy. As for Nike, I'm impressed by how they're always finding new avenues to promote their products. Recently, they used Epic Games's Unreal Editor for Fortnite to create an interactive experience to promote their new Nike Air. It was a whole game people could play that literally took place inside the shoe. Check Airphoria Fortnite for more details.

Your packaging animation (Or what we call in the industry "Packshot" animation) needs to be easy to read and should attract the focus of the audience to the product. It's common for this kind of product to compete for space on social media with other interesting and well-crafted animations. So if you want to retain attention, here are some suggestions: 1- The first few seconds are the most important. Focus on an overall shot of the product and the brand. 2- Avoid over-complicated camera movements. Focus on realistic camera movements like panning and zooming. No need to move the camera in space. 3- Add contrast and colour variation. Most of the interfaces in social media are White, so try to add colour and contrast to attract attention.

There are many ways to showcase your Package Design with animation. As a rule of thumb, the first step is to identify what are your client needs with this animation piece. Are you designing "Eye Candy"? An animation piece created to make the product look interesting and desirable? Or maybe you're creating a feature highlighter? Where the animation is used to convey the features of the product and why a client would use it. Maybe it is an amalgamation of both. The important thing is to understand what the end goal is before picking the technique and platform.

Have you noticed that part of the Apple Design Language is not only their products but also the unpacking experience? That's the case for many other brands and products! Packaging is part of the branding process, how you choose to showcase your product on the store isles and Social Media. 3D and 2D Animation allows Brands to escape the traditional Photographed look and explore a more whimsical, fantastical and sometimes crazy visual language. It allows brands to show the product in depth with camera movements and framing that would be hard to reproduce in real life. Why show an Apple watch on someone's wrist if you can show it at Ten Thousand leagues under the sea as a visual queue to show how water resistant it is?

Many communities online have challenges for modelling artists where they ask Weekly for their users to model a specific object. These challenges can be time-consuming, but they are also the best way to improve and improve FAST. The best way to get good at 3D Modeling is to model every day! You don't need to spend all day modelling, which can lead to burnout, but do set a 30-minute slot a day to learn the tool. By the end of the week, you will have accumulated 210 minutes of experience! That's 3.5 hours! That's a total of 14 hours in a whole month and 168 hours in a whole year! It adds up fast, and that's realistically the only way to become good at something. What you do every day is what you become good at.