Whopper Sacrifice was a celebrated Facebook application developed for Burger King by the creatives at Crispin Porter + Bogusky. The campaign offered users an opportunity to "Sacrifice" friends in exchange for a free Whopper.
As an art developer on the project, Hook created the CG burn, fire and smoke effects used for dynamically sacrificing a friend's profile photo. The specified animation needed to be realistic, easily controlled, capable of quickly producing variations and accompanied by a hot animated mask. In order to manufacture the effect, a custom burn generator was developed by combining thirty-four individeoual layers of artificial procedural noise. The generator accounted for all aspects of the burning effect including the flames, glowing edges, discoloration due to heat, fly-away embers and smoke.
The entire simulation was driven by a single animated mask. It was efficient and customizable allowing for variations, revisions and supporting render passes to be generated within minutes. The generator was so powerful that it was awarded the title of "Proprietary Burn & Flame Propagation Entity." It was also given a gold star.
In addition to the fire effects, Hook developed banner ads to accompany the sacrificing application. The ads, while shy in nature, out-performed standard banners of similar size and shape by a margin of at least six to one. At the time of trafficking, experts believed the intensity of animation, burn effects and super-computer-like compression were the catalysts of what seemed like an unfair banner advantage. However, we now know it was actually the presence of Whopper imagery that contributed to their unlikely success.
A breakdown of the procedural burning edge technique created to make it appear as though what we're doing over here is exceptionally complicated
Campaign Components
- Procedural Burn Effects
- Dynamic Burn Masking
- CG Fire Effects
- Standard Ads
