A52, a Los Angeles-based visual effects company, recently worked on two high-profile, visual effects-based projects that differ from the company’s usual spot work: "College Football," a client-direct commercial for FOX Sports that promotes the network’s coverage of the 2003 college football season, and the opening title sequence for Carnivàle, an eerie new HBO series about a Depression-era traveling carnival. Each job dazzles in its own distinctive way.
"College Football" has an attractive, rough-hewn look. The :30, which can be customized to accommodate each Saturday’s match-up, transforms familiar gridiron figures—players, referees, cheerleaders—into stylized tinfoil characters that inhabit a world made up of more tinfoil. Glistening clouds, rain that goes upwards, and other playful images populate this strange, shiny place, which is based on illustrations originally created by artist Arthur James. The promo’s audio—crowd noise, referee whistles, broadcasters’ voices, and Nortec Collective’s techno track "Polaris"—is as rich as the visuals.
"Scott Bantle [creative director/director at FOX Sports] wanted to do something that looked like it had been done by college kids," says Darcy Leslie Parsons, executive producer at A52. "He wanted it to have a feeling like these kids had done it in their spare time just for fun."
Parsons and the A52 team—which included visual effects supervisor/Inferno artist Patrick Murphy, who also served as online and offline editor, and producer Leighton Greer—were involved in the project from the beginning, working on pre-visualization tests that involved shooting on digital video and film. "We got involved right in the beginning to help [Bantle] figure out what he needed to shoot in order to make it all come together properly in post," explains Parsons.
The promo took about three weeks to create, and included a live-action shoot. Post work was done with Discreet’s Inferno. A52, who has worked with FOX Sports for a number of years, will be doing a new job for the network this month.
The Big Top
The title sequence that A52 created for Carnivàle looks elaborate, and its conception and execution were indeed complex. The :90 tour de force opens with tarot cards falling onto an arid ground; it’s as if they were blown in by the winds of fate. The cards, instead of displaying traditional tarot designs, feature well-known European paintings that are meant to illustrate good and evil through the ages. The camera moves in and "enters" one of the cards, which features images of angels and clouds that now appear in layered 3-D.
Traveling deeper into the card, the camera reveals a soup line in Depression-era America. The still image then morphs into archival film footage of the soup line, which shifts into more footage from the era. Then the camera pulls back and "enters" another card. Throughout the sequence, the camera repeats these moves, combining shots of the cards, paintings and archival footage. In the end, the camera pulls back to show the cards and sand being blown away, revealing the show’s title.
The high-profile Carnivàle is set in 1934, and centers on a traveling carnival moving through the Dust Bowl. The show focuses on a mysterious fugitive with hidden talents who is taken in by the carnival, and a shadowy evangelist; the two ultimately face each other in a battle of good vs. evil.
A52 got involved with the project because of Angus Wall, owner/editor at Rock Paper Scissors, Los Angeles, which owns A52. "It started from a relationship that Angus had with HBO," says A52 senior producer Scott Boyajan.
"They knew Wall’s work," adds Parsons, "and they drew us into the bidding process."
The project was a challenge. "The design stage was critical," notes Boyajan. "Once we had narrowed in on the idea that we were going to use these famous pieces of artwork, travel through them to find stock footage and then travel back out to reveal different pieces of artwork, it was a matter of finding artwork that we thought was applicable. It was quite a bit of work going through a lot of different art books and resources to find images that conveyed this big picture of good vs. evil over all time."
Parsons notes that her shop was initially going to use images from around the world to illustrate the cards, but decided to employ only European paintings in the end. (However, the title sequence music, created by independent composers Wendy Melvoin and Lisa Coleman, is flavored with South Asian elements.)
According to Boyajan, deconstruction and reconstruction were necessary to create 3-D versions of the classic paintings. "Once we had the artwork, the designers [used] Photoshop to break those elements apart," he relates. "When you’re dealing with an artwork, the front layer blocks things behind it [so] when you start separating those elements out, you have to go in and recreate those layers. There’s not only the work of tearing the thing apart, but there’s also getting into [the original] artist’s mind and building stuff in the same style."
"We’re dealing with Michelangelo," Parsons points out. "It’s not the easiest thing."
At A52, credit goes to Murphy, creative director/editor Wall, visual effects supervisors/ Inferno artists Simon Brewster and Vonetta Taylor, and designers Ryan Gibson and Jesse Monsour. The A52 contingent also included the CGI team of Denis Gauthier, Westley Sarokin and Jeff Willette.
"The scans that we did for those pieces of artwork, because we were doing HD, were amazing," says Boyajan. (HD was necessary because HBO broadcasts in the format.) "Not only is it HD, but when we were traveling through, you see an incredible amount of detail," he adds. "Those files were from transparencies and scanned at three hundred megabytes. They’re huge."
After the paintings were broken down into layers in Photoshop, the elements were handed off to the CGI department, which used Houdini to create a camera move. "Traditionally, you would use Houdini or CGI to create objects," says Boyajan. "We weren’t using it for its full capacity. We were using it to create a camera move through a 2.5-D world. They lined up all the elements and then created a CGI camera move through the elements."
Murphy and Brewster integrated the CGI and the stock footage. "Simon Brewster brought all of those colors together and gave you that textural feeling," says Boyajan.
Currently, 90 percent of A52’s work is for commercials, and recent endeavors include Goodyear’s "Screw," directed by Noam Murro of Biscuit Filmworks, Los Angeles, out of Goodby, Silverstein & Partners, San Francisco; and adidas’ "Slugs," helmed by Frank Budgen of bicoastal Anonymous Content and Gorgeous Enterprises, London, for TBWA/180, San Francisco.
Parsons notes that title design is an area the shop would like to get involved in, and the Carnivàle sequence has proved a successful entry. "We are looking at this as our first huge step in that direction," she says. "In the last two or three years, we’ve done a lot of design work for commercials. The Carnivàle titles are going to be the jewel of our design reel and our company reel right now."
