SHORT CUTS
Vinton Studios, Portland, Ore., produced two :15s for Kraft Foods’ Jell-O X-treme Pudding Sticks, highlighting the product’s new flavors, Oreo and Chips Ahoy!. "Skateboard" and "Spaceship"—which began airing March 15—feature stick figures enjoying the tasty snack in a tube. The Vinton crew included animation director/director/storyboard artist/layout Eric Wiese; executive producer Paul Golden; producer Jan Johnson; head of production Lourri Hammack; coordinator/assistant animator/artworker/traditional ink & painter Molly Sanderson; animators Brad Rau, Alan Lau and Joe Merideth; assistant animators/artworkers/traditional ink & painters Victoria Goldner and Jon David Buffam; assistant animator Brian Larson; ink & painter Jenny Kincade; technical director/modeling/texture artist/lighting artist/CG animator Patrick VanPelt; compositor Al Cubillas; editor Cam Williams; and Flame artist Tom Burney. The spots were created by FCB New York.
Planet Blue, Santa Monica, has added Avid editing services to its capabilities. Inferno/Flame online editor Matt Welch will serve as the company’s offline editor. Planet Blue is best known for its visual effects and animation work for commercials, features, television, music videos and the Internet.
Hollywood-based strategic design and creative production company Troika Design Group created four on-air promos for TV Land which involved concepting, scripting, design, animation, editing, sound design and original music composition. The campaign titled "Take Me to TV Land" premiered at the taping of the second annual TV Land Awards: A Celebration of Classic TV, and made its debut during the ceremony’s initial telecast on March 17. The challenge presented to Troika’s project creative director/lead designer Sonia Lamba and her team was to create a story that combined original animation and illustration with existing brand elements and show clips to promote 20 classic American television shows. Troika focused on highlighting the personalities from each show while creating an abstract visual journey. The spots are sound bite-driven and use graphics to create the concept of "Take Me to TV Land." Troika’s team watched numerous hours of footage from hundreds of episodes to identify sound bites and clips that conveyed the story of the journey to TV Land. The results of that process helped Lamba write scripts for promos titled "Everything Television," "Kitsch," "Classics" and "Zany Comedy." Additional credits go to Troika editors Bryan Hargraves and Luis Martos, executive producer Mandy Martin, associate producer Steiner Kierce, designer/animator Richard Eng, animator Jayson Whitmore and composer/sound designer Robert Cairns.
MUSIC NOTES
Stephen Arnold Music (SAM), Dallas, has completed production on the theme music for Court TV’s original series, Extreme Evidence. Working closely with Viewpoint Creative, Los Angeles and Boston—the shop that created the animation—SAM composed music that matched the edgy animation of various disasters, including a train and ship wreck, as well as a bridge collapse. The music’s feel is an intense techno percussive style that builds as the show opens. For Stephen Arnold Music, Stephen Arnold and Chad Cook handled the composing, programming and post scoring, with Cook also producing and working as recording engineer. Clay Lorance was the editor and sound designer.
CLIPLAND
Radium, San Francisco and Santa Monica, completed compositing work on a music video for Ludacris. "Splash Waterfalls" features the Atlanta rapper in various steamy situations with beautiful women, as well as an ethereal backdrop of waterfalls. The project started with a concept from director Dave Meyers of bicoastal/international @radical.media. Radium CG artist Darin Hilton modeled the scene in 3-D. Hilton rendered it using Global Illumination and painted a digital matte painting on top for the mountains, city and foreground rock. He also provided a style piece for later alterations to the painting. The 3-D matte painting was then finished in Inferno, complete with camera moves, by artists Andy McKenna and Ali Laventhol. According to Radium co-founder/creative director Jonathan Keeton, the main task in the clip was to create a fantastic world in which the camera found the rapper from time to time throughout the video. Ludacris was placed in a surreal landscape on a cliff, looking over a fjord with mountains rising up from the water, and in a city set against a backdrop of alpine mountains. He was shot against green screen standing in a cloud of dry ice; the world was first created as a 2-D matte painting, and then created in 3-D using Maya and Inferno. Additional Radium credits go to executive producer Matthew McManus and senior producer Scott Friske. McKenna was visual effects supervisor/lead artist/online editor on the project, with Laventhol, who also handled background design and creation, serving as lead artist/online editor. In addition, Hilton worked on the matte painting elements, textures and geometry.
