Siggraph is a show that each year inspires creativity with a combination of art and technology. The featured work often appears in the annual Electronic Theater and Computer Animation Festival. Other, newer clips are welcome surprises found on the exhibition floor.
One not to miss, which is expected to make its appearance at Venice, Calif.-based Digital Domain’s booth, is the cutting edge new Nine Inch Nails music video “Only,” directed by David Fincher of bicoastal Anonymous Content. For the audience at Siggraph 2005–slated for July 31-Aug. 4 at the Los Angeles Convention Center–this clip demonstrates the latest in photoreal CG and rendering techniques. For the rest of us, DD has created unique and brilliantly executed entertainment. “Only” is essentially a still life, brought to life. The setting is a person’s desk top–on it sits a laptop computer, mouse, cup of coffee, Pin Art block, and a Newton’s Cradle.
When the music starts, every note is reflected in the movement of the coffee, the image on the computer screen, and everything else that can move. Nine Inch Nails’ lead singer Trent Reznor appears in the pin art.
After extensive previz, production began with Fincher shooting the DV format of the tabletop setting, used primarily for the establishing shot and reference material. Most of the clip is photoreal CGI, and includes much camera work such as focus pulling, all created in the digital realm.
Fincher shot Reznor in front of a greenscreen, lit with blue, red and key light. The colors have different levels of luminance, which were augmented by hand by the DD team, which then brought out the 3-D geometry by converting the footage to a grey scale.
“David Fincher wanted to push the technology,” reported Ed Ulbrich, senior VP of production/executive producer at Digital Domain’s commercial unit. “He didn’t want to scan his head; he wanted to do it with light to get the best performance out of Trent.”
The work required a mix of proprietary and off-the-shelf applications, including the V-Ray rendering system–a significant part of DD’s rendering pipeline–and DD’s own Nuke compositing system and photogeometry process.
Next generation rendering will be an important focus at Siggraph this year, relates Ulbrich. “As labor rates skyrocket, you start to look for more efficient ways to add horsepower and develop a next generation rendering pipeline.” He adds that this will impact commercialmaking, notably photoreal elements such as CG cars for automotive advertising.
Keith McCabe, CG supervisor at New York-based Charlex, observed that the agencies seem to be increasingly aware of the level of photorealism that CG companies are capable of achieving, and this is reflected in their approaches to spot work. “They are starting to understand that we can make things look photoreal,” he said. “Creatively, I think the agencies are becoming more comfortable with CG, and they rely on it more heavily than in the past.”
The need to speed up the work resonated around the industry when commercialmakers discussed the upcoming Siggraph. For instance, new rendering capabilities are top of mind for Melissa Davies, a partner in Venice-based Sight Effects. “The goal is speed and reliability. It’s driven by the complexity of the project combined with the growing demand for HD and 2k,” she said. To illustrate the issue, Davies explained that Sight Effects recently created a 360-degree EA promo for a video wall that had to be rendered as 10k data. “We looked at everything, and we ended up in Maya but had to break it up into nine different cameras,” she related. “We couldn’t find any package that could render one camera. They all had their inherent problems. We’ll be looking for additional capabilities at Siggraph.”
Bryan Godwin, president of New York-based previz company Launch, is looking to speed things up on the previsualization side of the equation. “We’re looking for real-time technology and how to apply it toward previz, whether it’s for motion capture, accelerators, or for real-time 3-D. Our outlook is to animate and produce quick 3-D in a session with a client.”
McCabe added that he is looking at new computers with dual-core processors. “It means we can produce more in less time,” he said. “Just on rendering alone you might be able to get work twice as fast. That’s massive for the tight deadlines we have for commercial work.”
Joe Burrascano, CG supervisor at New York-based rhinofx, reported that the company recently upgraded its renderfarm with new dual core-based computers from BOXX. “This allows us to put twice as much rendering power in the same space; we plan to add more,” he said. “The jobs are becoming more render intensive because we are going photoreal.”
Rhinofx technical director Jesse Clemens added that the company is beta testing Temerity Software’s Digital Pipeline tools, aimed to streamline the workflow.
And he and others reported interest in developing 64-bit supported 2-D and 3-D systems. “64-bit increases memory efficiently, so it allows you to work with much larger amounts of data,” Clemens said.
But it looks like the creative work will be the centerpiece of this year’s Siggraph. “It seems the industry is peeking technologically, so it seems like it’s more about the artistry,” said Godwin.
As always, Siggraph is also about experimentation, and companies like Charlex, which will also have a presence at Siggraph, thrives on this sort of opportunity. Charlex pushed the envelope in the music video realm recently by creating a fully CG, 3-D piece of video art for “CaretStik” for the band Plaid and London-based Warp Records; it is traveling the festival circuit and expected to make Charlex’s Siggraph demo reel. The clip shows a yellow and black CG fence, which responds through movement to the different aspects of the music. It comes to an end far too soon.
“We enjoy doing experimental work,” said executive creative director Alex Weil, whose team got to try several new techniques for the production. “Our goal was to do some work out of the usual mode.”
The mono-monikered Gelman, who was the clip’s director/designer through Charlex, explained, ‘We tried to respond to the track itself, which is continuous drum and bass, no highs and lows; it’s pretty consistent. So I wanted to express that through consistent imagery where a little change in the image would reflect changes in the music, but very subtly.”
Techical animator Steve Mann explained that Gelman approached the task mathematically, with Charlex writing a program to respond to certain frequencies of sound. This was deployed to animate the fence in Alias’ Maya (which was also used for previz).
“We printed out the wavelength for the track; we separated the bass, treble, and assigned specialized movement to each track so when you hear a certain beat, you see a certain pattern,” explained animation director Anthony Tabtong, adding that the animators then worked on the clip by hand to give it a more organic feel.
Lead lighter James Fisher added that even the lighting choices were driven by the music. “We did a flat graphic look, a realistic look, a wire frame, volumetric light, and clouded version,” he related. “Each one would come on at an appropriate time.”
As for the decision to go 3-D, Gelman explained that the members of Plaid grew up in the ’70s, while there was an interest in technological gimmicks. “I thought it would be interesting if the music video had an additional object like glasses.
“There is a resurgence of interest in 3-D,” he related. “People who grew up in the ’70s bring that to their work. It’s my generation.” He cited as an example of that sort of experimentation the new 3-D film The Adventures of Shark Boy and Lava Girl from director Robert Rodriguez. In the Plaid video, McCabe reported that the two-camera implementation to create the 3D was done in Apple’s Shake.
ELECTRONIC THEATER
Siggraph’s 2005 Electronic Theatre reel, featuring a collection of CGI work selected by a jury of leaders in the field, will include two commercials from familiar faces Digital Domain and Framestore-CFC, London and New York.
Digital Domain earned recognition for its work on another Fincher-directed project, “Constant Change” for Hewlett Packard and San Francisco-based Goodby, Silverstein & Partners. The spot has already been recognized in advertising circles including being honored in the 2005 AICP Show.
This attention-grabbing spot features a man walking through his office as everything around him–including time of day, the office, and even the man’s clothes–change at rapid fire pace. This collaboration involved shooting the lead actor in front of a green screen and a series of complex techniques to add CG environments and clothing in every frame.
Additional work from Digital Domain featured in the Electronic Theater includes visual effects shots from the new motion picture Stealth, directed by Rob Cohen (who helms commercials through Los Angeles-headquartered Original Film).
Framestore’s honored animation and effects work was in the service of creating a European spot, “Hector’s Life,” for the Renault Espace. Created by Paris agency Publicis Conseil, with production companies Outsider in London and Bandits in Paris, the spot was directed by Dom and Nic.
At the start of the commercial, we find ourselves outside a waiting room at a European railway station. At the bottom of the waiting room doors is Hector–a flat, paper figure–who slips onto a train and begins a journey out of the city. In the end, the spot cuts back to the waiting room and a man reading a newspaper–and the viewer sees a cartoon strip in the newspaper (entitled “Hector’s Life”) from which our hero has excused himself; the frame’s empty save for the word balloons. The end shot features the Espace and the tagline “Isn’t space the ultimate luxury?”
Production began with a live action shoot on location in Italy, supervised by Framestore’s Ben Cronin and Jake Mengers. Color correction, CGI and Discreet Inferno work all followed. The challenge facing the animation team was to create a character who, while essentially 2-D, was interacting in a 3-D world. This required the construction of two separate rigs, one 2-D and one 3-D, for moments when an element of depth was required. “We created a low-res version of Hector first,” said lead animator Nicklas Andersson, “which we used to try out walk cycles and other test elements for the creative team. We also shot some hand held camera footage outside our office and put him in it. The biggest challenge was that working in 2-D denies you the sense of weight that you can more easily create in 3-D.” Global illumination references from the location shoot were used to tackle the lighting.
Among the other projects in the Electronic Theater are “Gopher Broke” and “In The Rough”, two shorts from Santa Monica-based Blur Studio; and the RESfest 2004 opening, created by Venice-based Motion Theory.
