mcdonald’s //
times square trivia

Animated content for McDonald’s New Year’s Eve at Times Square, NYC.

Layout and motion design: Caio Marco // Art direction, footage and copywriting: DDB Chicago

McDonald’s and DDB Chicago invited me to design and animate 12 fun trivia questions about McD’s history -
to be displayed on top of McDonald’s iconic restaurant at Times Square, NYC on the New Year’s Eve.

As soon as I got briefed, I knew I’d be facing some specific challenges.
The first one: how to incorporate and animate the classic shiny golden confetti in a way that is fun, but not distracting?
Oh, and also use that to transition between sections?

I realized that simply using stock footage wouldn’t get us the results we needed,
so I came up with fully customizable confetti 100% done in After Effects.

That build was essential so I could manually tweak and keyframe some parameters such as
confetti amount, falling speed, decay, parallax, and so many others.

With that level of customization, I could build specific transitions and background scenes:

Since we had 12 questions to be displayed through the night - therefore, 12 different videos to produce -
the easiest way to do it while being able to quickly make any necessary changes down the road was to build a template.

(building the template wasn’t quick, but as always, a few days I was thankful that I did it)

With the use of a lot of expressions, conditional parameters, sliders and checkboxes,
I was able to develop a main template that saved us a lot of time.

Besides the nerdy automation stuff,
we had to pull off some eye-catching elements that could stood out in the midst of Times Square’ chaotic excitement
so the eyes of the viewer could be pointed to the correct answer.

With all that and some quirky animations for the texts,
the final 12 videos were ready in the oven.

Hope looking at all these videos didn’t get you thinking about Big Macs.
I had to order one or two during the making of this job.
Or three. I just had to. It was on my contract.

Thank you!

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