The MINI Vision Urbanaut

Wanderlust

The “driving moment” represents the joy of being on the road. Wanderlust is the allure of unwinding while you travel, exploring and seeking out new experiences and impressions – in the city, but also beyond urban areas, feeling (temporarily) at home wherever you find yourself.

As Oliver Heilmer, head of MINI design, flips through his sketch book, his drawings take on a life of their own. the MINI Vision Urbanaut is designed to accentuate the journey, whether being driven or taking control yourself. as you wander, passengers discover all possible and impossible places along the way.

Chill

The Chill moment invites you to catch a breath and pause in the here and now. The car becomes a kind of retreat, a haven where you can relax – or work with full concentration – during a journey.

As Oliver is walking through the city when he stumbles upon a missing cobblestone. small plants grow in this gap, and they look almost like a small jungle. he imagines what it would be like to have a place of peace now, a place of retreat, or even an urban oasis.

A quick look behind the illustrations

Creation of these animations started with quite an extensive graphical design phase where we developed the general look of the MINI Vision Urbanaut world. Goal was to create a world that is very stylized and abstract, playfull and adaptable to the three moments yet keeping a consistent style.

For the illustrations of people (which there were quite a lot in all the different pieces we had to create) we created an 3d animatic version of everything we needed before going out and shooting people doing all moves. That footage was then taken as a base for hand drawing the illustration frames. Most of the shots where illustrated in 12.5 frames/second ("on twos") for a proper hand drawn look and also to save time. We created about 3 minutes of animations with animated illustrations in, so saving a few frames was quite neccessary. Shots with fast moving action though, like the ones featuring SkaterGirl, had to be illustrated at a full 25 fps.

The graphical worlds of the three moments was quite diverse yet matching a greater scheme. For this we created a basic color and also shapes pallette that served as a reference for the creation of every world. Wanderlust, for it's moving nature, was more edgy. Toned in yellow colors, featuring triangles as the classic "Go! Play" Iconography for example. These very simple color/shape mood slides helped us a lot to keep everything consistent across the many applications in print and animation we had to do.

For the Eye Candy animations three completely discrete, original graphical worlds were created. Chill, Vibe and Wandlust all got their own distinct graphical style which makes the world recognizeable immediately.

To put yourself right into the center of those worlds an Instagram Filter was created which offers those three graphical worlds as options. Use that filter to dive deep into the world of MINI Vision Urbanaut.

The filter can be found here: NEXTGen Urbanaut Filter