Pratt & Whitney commissioned Mainframe to promote the industry leading architecture of their Geared Turbofan engine. After the success of our promo they also asked us to look at two further films detailing features of the engine and one geared for a marketing audience.
The Promo.
After delving into how the engine's individual parts come together, we created a chronological sequence from concept through the complex assembly of innovative new technology ending with a resolved GTF engine ready for take off. Revealing the complexity inside the jet engine and conveying how precise each component is when fitted together, this abstract sequence delivered a beauty to the subject traditionally reserved for high end automobile films.
Marketing Film.
Bookended between their long standing heritage and future ambitions we showcased many of the Geared Turbofan's attributes and benefits in this film.
Set within a cavernous space reminiscent of both an art gallery and an aircraft hangar we conceived an environment focused on a huge video wall serving as both a surface to present many of the facts, figures and footage required and as a light source for the space.
Features.
This film involved creating abstract representations of the features that collectively make up the Geared Turbofan engine. Key features included strength, weight, heat resistance and durability.
Lightweight
One of the many tasks was to convey the lightweight aluminium construction of the fan blades. Pratt & Whitney were looking for a more whimsical approach here, resulting in us inflating a model of the fan blade. This was produced using Maya's nCloth to control the different parts of the inflation process.
Metal Crystals
The GTF turbine blades are grown from a single metal crystal. This makes for an extremely strong and heatproof blade capable of withstanding temperatures "hotter than volcanic lava".
Taking the volcanic theme further we animated a high number of platonics scaling up around the 3d mesh of the turbine. The shot was set up procedurally using one master ramp to animate the scale and colour of each platonic giving us a lot of creative control to go back and make adjustments as required.
3:1 Reduction Gear
The Fan Drive Gear System creates a 3 to 1 ratio between the core and the Fan Blades. We decided to use ropes twisting as a visual representation for the different speeds of the gears. Here we used Maya's nHair tool, where dynamic splines where constrained to the outer rim of the rotating gear system. As the gear system rotates, the ropes tighten at different rates.
12:1 Bypass Ratio
A bypass ratio is a difficult thing to represent. It took several iterations to find a solution but we settled on the idea of two volumes of air.
The form of the volume takes the shape of a nacelle (the exterior shell that houses an engine) with two volumes representing the bypass air (blue) and the core (green). This was simulated using Maya Fluids with an animating vortex and turbulence.
Thrust
Finally, we used Pratt & Whitney's brand colours to emulate energy flow and air thrust from inside the core of the engine, through to the tail end. Once again MASH was used to deal with fairly large amounts of deforming geometry, with added control over the specific distribution of colour on the individual trials.
Credits
Client - Pratt & Whitney / Directom/Animation/Production - MAINFRAME / Audio - Nice Sound / Voice Over - Scott William
