MIND PALACE MEDIA | NICK RITTER
Trinity Train
Problem
Trinity Life Sciences is a one-stop shop for all things marketing, sales, and analytics in the life sciences industries. It’s a highly complicated system and environment to work in and frankly after doing a couple of videos with them, I’m still not totally sure about all the details.
They had a big convention to present with a video and the core story they wanted to tell is that with Trinity, companies can customize a path to their ideal future. Oh, and they wanted to tell that story with a train.
Still from the final video.
Built the whole train and track system in Houdini.
Strategy
I was inspired by the feeling of a train whipping through grand vistas off into a bright future. And so that image and emotion became the centerpiece of the whole video.
Knowing there’d be these wide-open landscapes, I decided to play out most of the video prior just the opposite: in more focused, flatter compositions. That contrast from flat to deep space should create that inspirational feeling we were going for.
So before the train really takes off, we play most of the rest of the video in more static, flat spaces – such as drawing on a map.
I decided to push the train landscape shots to the next level by creating a 3D version of the train and train tracks. This allowed me to animate the train towards and away from the camera to make sure that nothing about these images felt flat. Again, this creates the most contrast possible from the map to the train.
Initial storyboard sketch of the map.
One of the style frames I built as we zeroed in on our train design.