Nebula - Miniaturized modified atmosphere packaging

Nebula is the first device with miniaturized modified atmosphere packaging technology or MAP; a well-established technology commonly used by the food industry to preserve the quality of fresh products over a longer period of time without the use of preservatives that could alter the nature or taste of the product.

The concept is simple: the natural ambient air, composed of nitrogen, oxygen, argon, water vapor, carbon dioxide and traces of other gasses and vapors, is replaced inside the package by a gas mixture, often simply nitrogen and carbon dioxide.

The client (SAES Design House) wanted a video to introduce their product called Nebula to the world while not being too precious about its technical attributes. Low key lighting, a focus on materials, abstract metaphors and an edit that flows while keeping the viewer engaged was key for this project.

The video was a challenge mainly because I (Jesus Suarez) was in charge of all the conceptualization, art direction, design and animation in a span of about 25 days so I had to be pretty methodical about production and render times as well as turnarounds and getting feedback from the client.

The particle animation was specially challenging since we wanted to represent the gasses used in the product in an abstract way, so initially I made a regular gas simulation with the camera sort of inside the container, but eventually switched it to this abstract particulate world where the two sources of gas create a negative space and the gas has a lot of texture but still behaves like a gas.

Match cuts helped maintain the flow and PIP were used extensively to be able to showcase different features in a shorter time. We wanted the video to be around 30 seconds long so this was very useful for our edit.

The product was modeled in Rhinoceros 3D, post processing of 3D assets were made in Cinema 4D as well as the animation and lighting and rendering was made in Redshift. All the post effects and graphics animations were done in After Effects.