Trick or Treat Effect
A halloween mini-narrative illustrating ‘Trick’ in the back camera experience and ‘Treat’ in front camera expereince. This Instagram effect was launched to welcome in the Halloween season, and was one of the first effects I helped launch while at Meta. Made in October 2019.
Back Camera Experience
Modeled in Maya. Textured in Substance. Running in Spark.
Front Camera Experience
was made to be user interactive. Whenever our face tracking tech registered the users mouth as open, candy would fly up and out of the jack-o-lantern bucket into the sky.
If there was a V2, I would opt for the candy to fly into the users mouth, and even pop and disappear on the users mouth closing around the candy. However, the facial recognition tech wasn’t where we needed it to be to achieve the above at the time of launch.
I was tasked with designing, modeling and texturing the hero Ghost as well as a medley of the set assets. I textured the entirety of the set based on the art directors request. We were going for a simplistic, stylized, “cute” direction. That is reflected in the choice of silhouette of the characters as well as the lettering used throughout. The rig and animation of the hero skeleton monopolized a majority of our space limit to run this effect performantly, so optimization was key especially in terms of modeling.
Entire Scene: 4358 Tris
Grave Design Development
Ghost Design Development
Had I been art directing this effect, I probably would have simplified the story arc of the animation, so there was a bit more breathing room for the narrative to unfold. In doing so, I think that could have allowed us to soften the faceting of the ground and the ghost and add some fluttering and bending animation on the body fabric. However, those are just some of the trade-offs you have to make when your working under the technical restraints of running in real time.
Looking back, I also would have gone a little more adventurous with the color palette or added a slight LUT filter to add a fresh treatment to these classic Halloween troupe, I had actually developed some options and pitched them to the AD at the time. However, going with a color palette that is the least objectionable to the masses, is usually the option that is chosen when creating for a user base as vast as Instagram’s. At the end of the day, it is the Instagram user base that is our clientele.
All in all, I think this was a very fun effect, I know the artists working on it had a blast making it and the videos below are a few examples of posted content made by Instagram users having fun playing around with the effect and enjoying the holiday spirit.
