Taking corporate brands and adding some sort of stupid flair to them will never not be be boring. Thus Duracell Fuck Ton™ was born (trademark pending).
I used Houdini and After Effects to complete this project. The battery and the lightning strikes were created in Houdini. Getting the flicker and movement right for the lightning was an interesting challenge which required me to dive deeper into vex.
The background clouds, text, and all post was done in After Effects.
Below is the storyboard I drew up for the video.
Below are some flipbooks from the Houdini scene.
Main camera
Close-up
Outer view
Technical Explanation:
I needed two points for the lightning to connect to, one on the battery and another away from the battery and outside of view. To allow for some organic movement I added in a large sphere to encompass the battery and with a scatter node on both the battery and sphere, linked the seed property between the two and inputted a function that would jitter the movement randomly at a 25th of the current $F speed, between the seeds 1 and 25.
Function:
int($F / fit01(rand(int($F/35)), 1, 25))
To get the light to flicker like I see actual lightning do, I inputted a fit function to have the search radius jitter, so that the lightning would essentially turn on and off.
Function:
fit01(rand($F/30 + 10), 5, 6)
Below are the rendered out scenes.
Below is the final product, enjoy!