Our film starts on one single 5 cent coin, discarded by an unknown person thinking it's useless. But this coin is powerful. It comes to rest and we move in slowly to inspect it's surface. The 5 cent coin begins to shift and a water well extrudes from its surface along with two children. In a single shot, we move through the water from the well and reveal a second coin coming to rest. One by one, more and more coins appear, with scenes of hope revealing themselves upon their surface. We see a baby brought back to life, children carrying bricks becoming educated. Our coin world becomes larger and larger as more coins roll in, adding to the fund.

As we pan back in one final movement, we pass a small village that has been given hope, and it all started with the giving on one single coin. Finally we see that all of our coins have formed a large number five - our 5 Fund in its entirety.

We created the camera move and overall layout of the project using Maya. Rigid body dynamics were used for the realistic coin role which opens the film. From there we generated multiple models of the children and the water-well forming and used blend-shape layers to animate their growth. We took care to make sure the models had consistent topology and texture layouts throughout this section, with the detailed modelling and texturing being done in both Mudbox and Mari.

Fluid simulations using Realflow were integrated and further highly detailed 3d modelling was completed. A small amount of rigging was required to create the subtle movement of the characters, and simple key frame animation was used to build on the walls and desks of the class room. The project was brought together for photo realistic lighting using Vray.

Multiple passes were rendered from 3d and composited within Nuke, this stage also included creating the soft depth of field and light play over the lens as the camera moves around it's miniature world. The challenge was creating a technique that could bring us in close for emotional moments, but also allow us to move extremely wide whilst still maintaining the life-like detail.