Overview
From tyres to soles — matching Michelin tyre technology and Northwave’s shoe know-how. This bespoke product video for Michelin coupled filmed video footage with innovative motion graphics.
Story
White Noise Media delivered their video footage of a mountain biker they’d filmed riding the trails at Gisburn Forest, Lancashire, UK. We was tasked as skilled motion designers to highlight the key benefits, and unique selling points of the product in a way that was technical, informative, and aesthetically pleasing — all at the same time.
Skills
Rotoscoping
The rider was rotoscoped (or cut out) in some scenes to enable us to place animated graphics and text in-front and behind him, creating the illusion that they were actually in the scene with him.
Plexus
Transitions
Motion tracking / match moving
Some motion designers call it ‘video tracking’, others call it ‘match moving’. Nevertheless, it’s the process of selecting an area on the video footage that you want to track — such as the Michelin logo on the sole of the shoe in this case — and using tools in After Effects to track those pixels as it moves frame by frame. It can be quite tricky if the quality of the footage is poor or there’s a lot of motion blur.
Then once you have the tracking data that’s been created you attach all sorts of graphics, text, information, effects to it that you want and make it move with the scene. Motion tracking is definitely one of our favourite things to do in After Effects, and you’ll see a lot of it in our other motion graphics based product videos.

Transitions using triangles and camera moves

Geometric patterns generated in After Effects using Plexus

Graphics tracked to the shoe

Graphics tracked to the bike

Motion tracked graphics and Plexus

Colour and contour graphics revealed by a full screen wipes