How do you pay homage to one of the most outstanding television series of all time? By creating a 3D animation with Cinema4D and Adobe Creative Cloud.
"Breaking Bad" is considered one of the best television series and shows the transformation of lung cancer-infected chemistry teacher Walter White (brilliantly played by Bryan Cranston) into a ruthless criminal. The crime drama delighted me but also millions of other television viewers. As a big fan, I also watched the prequel series "Better Call Saul" and can only recommend it.
In 2014 I decided to create a parody of “Breaking Bad” as a tribute. So I did a 3D animation about a fictional product called “Fulminated Mercury.” This blog article looks back at the design and the Easter eggs of this 3D animation.
Inspiration
The scene from the episode "Crazy Handful of Nothin" (season 1, episode 6) served as inspiration: Walter White blew up Tuco Salamanca‘s hiding place with fulminated mercury.
What is fulminated mercury?
Mercury fulminate, or C2N2O2Hg, is a primary explosive and poisonous, highly explosive, and disintegrates even under low mechanical or thermal stress. It is used to manufacture detonators, primers, and Flobert cartridges.
A little tweak of visual chemistry
Fulminated mercury is usually powdery. So I decided to represent the product in the form of spheres and experimented with the texture of the outer shell in Cinema4D.
In the end, I created a transparent, reflective, and smooth texture with cracks, similar to brittle ice.
The spheres came in three variants:
White (based on the main character Walter White)
Pink (based on the character Jesse Pinkman)
Blue (Walter and Jesse cooked blue crystal meth on the show)
Fulminated Mercury product logo
Chemistry played an essential role in the world of "Breaking Bad." Walter White and Jesse Pinkman cooked blue crystal meth in a highly complex chemical process and they used hydrofluoric acid to vanish evidence or corpses.
For the title design of “Breaking Bad,” the filmmakers took two elements from the periodic table: The first element is “Br” and stands for bromine. This chemical element is useful for flame retardants. The second is "Ba," which is short for barium, often used in fireworks.
Based on the official logo of Breaking Bad, I created a logo in Adobe Illustrator, which also stands out from the periodic table. Nevertheless, I had to take some liberties:
The chemical symbol “Fu” (for Fulminated) does not exist. The “F” symbol exists, though, but it stands for fluorine.
The chemical symbol for Mercury is “Hg,” but I changed it to “M” for my logo.
Say my name
Every product needs a manufacturer. Walter White used the pseudonym “Heisenberg” in the series. So I got the idea that the Heisenberg company developed and sold the product.
The font is the same used for Heineken.
Logo Heisenberg
Every company name also has a logo and simple symbols work better: A hat, a beard, and sunglasses represent Walter White/Heisenberg, and a glass flask is reminiscent of chemistry. The logo was created in Adobe Illustrator as well.
Look of the bottles and the labels
I modeled the glass vials for the balls in Cinema4D.
For each glass vial I created several labels in Adobe Photoshop, which included the following elements:
Company name “Heisenberg”
"Heisenberg" logo
Logo “Fulminated Mercury”
variant (white, blue, pink)
Image of the sphere
Warning notice ("WARNING: Highly sensitive to friction, shock, sparks, flame, and heat - and very explosive!")
All elements combined resulted in this picture:
Post-production
After I had all the elements together, I tackled the next steps for the 3D animation: In Cinema4D, I positioned the bottles and spheres, set the surroundings and the lights, placed the virtual 3D cameras and rendered all the shots.
I used an external render farm called RebusFarm to speed up the computationally intensive rendering process for the first time. I uploaded my entire Cinema4D file to the server and rendered some sequences. After a while, all of the images were finished and ready to be downloaded.
I combined all the images into an animation (compositing) in Adobe After Effects. All recordings consisted of various render passes, which showed a certain visual content: Ambient, depth, diffuse, object (with an alpha channel), reflection, refraction, RGB, shadow, and specular.
A special render pass, the depth pass, enabled me in After Effects to create and relocate a shallow depth of field afterward. In combination with the Lenscare plug-in from Frischluft, I redefined the focus.
Then I edited all the recordings in Adobe Premiere Pro, added the theme music from “Breaking Bad” to the video and exported the entire 3D animation. Below you can watch the video with the making-of, including the Easter eggs and 3D breakdowns.