A series of animated safety videos for a collaboration between Uber and Honda, produced with Studio Soup. Each piece drops the viewer into the driver's seat, sets up a specific road hazard, and shows how to get out of it.
The interesting part of a brief like this is the tension inside it. Safety content has to be exact: every scenario needs to be technically correct and consistent with the driving standards both companies require. But content nobody watches teaches nobody anything, so it also has to move.
Pre-Production
Locations, Lighting, and Look
The Honda HR-V is the constant across all six pieces. Working from a licensed model, I handled the lighting to establish how the car would read across the series.
The driver's hands took more exploring. They sit in frame for the entire runtime, so they set the tone of the whole thing: how stylized to go, how much detail to carry, how present they should be without pulling focus from the road. These are some of the versions tested before landing on the final look.
The POV framing
Rather than observing a situation from outside, you are behind the wheel when it happens, which makes the hazard read as something happening to you rather than something being explained at you.
Rather than observing a situation from outside, you are behind the wheel when it happens, which makes the hazard read as something happening to you rather than something being explained at you.
Finding the Locations
Each video centers on a specific hazard, and not every street works for every one. Scouting the city meant looking for the setting where each situation could unfold clearly: enough room for the hazard to build, the right sightlines for the driver to catch it, and surroundings that made the scenario plausible rather than staged.
Five Videos, Five Conditions
The client asked that each training video take place at a different time of day and in different weather, with the conditions feeding directly into the hazard being taught. Late night for a drowsy driver, heavy rain cutting visibility, thick morning fog, dense downtown traffic. Lighting stopped being a mood decision and became part of the lesson.
The other half of the work was the world itself. A city that sits still reads as a diagram, so a lot of time went into animating the secondary life of each environment: traffic in the distance, pedestrians, movement at the edges of frame. None of it is what the video is about, and all of it is what makes the video feel like a place. Keeping those scenes manageable at render time was its own problem to solve.
The Five Videos
Five hazards, five conditions, each one seen from the driver's seat.
My role: 3D modeling, animation, lighting, and rendering
Studio: Studio Soup
Client: Uber and Honda
Software: Cinema 4D, Redshift
Studio: Studio Soup
Client: Uber and Honda
Software: Cinema 4D, Redshift
