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.

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.

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.

Complex geometry patterns were generated using one of our favourite After Effects plugins ‘Plexus’ that appeared to morph and change shape throughout the film — just as the molecules of the shoe soles might change and adapt to their environment.

Using shapes and clever camera moves we created transitions to move the viewer through the film from one scene to the next. At one point we even used a full colour screen wipe to reveal a background graphic on map contours with the product on its own.

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.