Animating Shot 3

All three of our shots in this commercial have the car moving, two of them are pretty straight forward, essentially just driving straight down the road. Shot 3 is a little more complex, with the main car sliding into place next to the second car, to end the commercial with a beauty shot of the two Teslas sitting on the road. When looking for reference for how the car would slide into place, we wanted something that was more of a "coming to a screeching halt" rather than a drifting maneuver from a racing car or something. 

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The video above is the result of my first pass at animating the car sliding into place. I wanted to keep the motion somewhat subdued and didn't want it to look like reckless driving or as if the car was about to smash into the other car. But when I came back to it after a day, it looked too slow and not exciting enough. This was suppose to be a exciting and elegant commercial to show off this beautiful car, and this wasn't doing it. 

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After a few more iterations, this is where the animation is at right now. It is a lot more exciting and fast than it was before. One of the challenges was balancing and timing the rocking motion when the car came to a stop. The amount the weight shifted would depend on how fast the car was going and how much momentum it had, so that took a longtime to get it to look right.