Amnesty International’s You Are Powerful, a brand film that shows the power of an individual to make a positive difference, and TheLadders.com’s “Little Creatures,” a spot which shows the lack of power of would-be monsters, are SHOOT‘s Visual Effects & Animation chart toppers for the fall quarter.
The former depicts everyday people briefly leaving their comfortable environments, suddenly entering scenes of violence halfway around the world and then helping to stop the atrocities. We open on a young African American man who is thrust into news footage which shows another man about to be lynched. The African American enters the scene and lifts the noose off the intended victim’s neck, saving his life.
Next we see an elderly woman holding back a line of militia who had been beating demonstrators in the streets. To see this gray-haired, rather frail looking woman stop the violence is an inspiring sight. Other everyday people follow suit, changing the course of events as they transpire in news footage. A supered message simply reads, “You Are Powerful.”
Meanwhile, TheLadders.com’s “Little Creatures” resurrects the monster Guilala (from the 1967 feature The X from Outer Space, and then the more recent movie Guilala’s Counterattack: The Touyako Summit One-Shot Crisis. Except this time around, there are a bunch of Guilalas and they are all miniature versions. When these pint-sized creatures try to reach havoc in a city, they fall short–literally. They barely can elicit a reaction from nearby humans who go about their business. One mini-Guilala attempts to spew forth a fireball which instead is little more than a puff of smoke.
“If you think about it, this is what makes TheLadders different from other job search sites,” a voiceover intones as a scary gargantuan Guilala arrives on the scene, blowing up a gas station with a fireball and picking up a car and throwing it down the street as people run for their lives.
“Welcome to TheLadders: a premium job site for only 100K plus jobs and only 100K plus talent,” the voiceover concludes.
You Are Powerful
Directed by Kim Gehring of Academy Films, London, for agency Mother, London, the Chart’s number one entry, the 90-second You Are Powerful, entailed a post/VFX facility foursome: Smoke & Mirrors, New York and London; Framestore, London; and Rushes, London. The seven scenes bringing ordinary folk to the rescue were divided among this quartet of studios.
Ed Sayer, who served as Mother’s producer on the job, said, “There are many ways to approach any post task and in this case we gained the eclectic opinions of all this top worldwide post talent and when anyone talked, everyone listened. So the film received the benefit of all that experience and the joy of all that talent. It couldn’t have been done in the time without this total and ego-less cooperation, not to mention a client who allowed everyone to crack on and come back and truly wow them with a very powerful film.”
Indeed collaboration among the effects houses was paramount as the central idea relied heavily on postproduction, compositing hero characters into news footage so they appear to interact with the events. Fifty days of post work were required but only 11 days available in the schedule.
The hero characters’ portraits were shot as individual vignettes on 16mm and later the characters were shot against green screen, matching the timing and action of the existing news footage, on HDSR using stabilized shots as reference. They were then roto’d and composited into the film.
To create the degraded look of the existing films, while still recognizing the modern outfits, the graded characters were sent through a VHS deck and recomposited. The process was technically challenging for the team dropping the new characters into existing news footage so that they blended in seamlessly and yet stood out on first viewing.
“Technically it was very tricky,” related Rufus Blackwell, Rushes’ lead Flame artist. “The footage was already extremely degraded and often, as the sequences we were working with were hand held and the cameraman was walking, the perspective changes were problematic. Before the shoot we stabilized the footage so our green screen actors could match the move. In addition to the Flame artist supervising on set, we had a Combustion artist quickly making up rough comps of the director’s selected takes.
The turnaround time was tough so Smoke & Mirrors used both its offices and time zones to its advantage. This meant that Smoke & Mirrors creative director Sean Broughton could work through the night in New York with the London office picking up first thing the next day.
Broughton noted, “This was an opportunity to do some real good, so pulling out all the stops was the only way to go. Taking Kim Gehrig through each scenario and figuring out the best way to shoot the replacement heroes was a job. Understanding exactly how she wanted each shot to feel, as well as work technically, was very important. She shot everything we needed perfectly to make the shots work as well as they did…while still capturing the right emotional vibe.”
Framestore’s contribution was created over two days in Flame by VFX supervisor/senior Inferno artist Stephane Allender. “The actors had been shot blue screen,” said Allender. “I was working with genuine footage of a hanging which was pretty upsetting. The shot was of a noose being placed over a man’s neck. To create our effect, we first reversed the footage, so that the scene was of a noose being removed. We then had to remove the executioner and replace him with our actor. It was actually a very difficult shot because of the inevitable small mismatches between the positions of the real hangman’s arm and those of the actor–we had to stretch the arms and re-time the material.”
Marking the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, You Are Powerful is Amnesty International’s brand film and being screened in movie theaters in the U.K., with screenings also taking place in Canada and Australia.
“Little Creatures” Directed by Dante Ariola of bicoastal/international MJZ for Fallon Minneapolis, TheLadders’ “Little Creatures” became reality through the effects contributions of Method Studios, Santa Monica.
“Little Creatures” was shot onstage and on location in Cape Town, South Africa, with production support provided by Cape Town’s MIA. The city offered Ariola and his crew, including DP Philipe Le Sourd, wide latitude in what they could shoot, allowing them to stage the gas station explosion for real and perform a stunt involving a car racing down a street and flipping.
With the stunts and background plates shot, Ariola headed into the studio where he got old school, shooting a guy in a Guilala suit performing various actions in front of a bluescreen.
The Guilala suit was actually the original suit worn in the Guilala films, by the way, and it stood six feet tall and weighed about 100 pounds. The guy inside the suit wore a vest outfitted with hoses through which cool water was pumped to keep his body temperature down. Even with that accommodation, the man could only wear the suit for about 10 minutes or so before he needed a break.
The fact that he could perform at all in the suit and give the character a sense of personality is rather remarkable given the limitations it imposed, Fallon’s director of broadcast production Vic Palumbo said, pointing out, “He had to be very expressive with his body to translate those emotions–the frustration, the disappointment.”
While Ariola worked to get the best performance he could out of his talent, Method Studios VFX supervisor/Flame artist Alex Frisch and VFX supervisor/lead CG artist Andy Boyd were focused on “recreating the camera setups onstage, matching the camera setups of the background plates that we shot earlier in Cape Town,” Frisch said, ensuring that the eyelines and camera angles would be correct.
Once the shoot wrapped, Kirk Baxter of Rock Paper Scissors, Santa Monica, cut “Little Creatures,” and Method Studios combined the elements.
“For us, the challenge was creating the 3D Guilala so that he would match absolutely perfectly with the real practical suit that was shot,” Frisch said, noting, “There are quite a few shots where it cuts from a studio shot to a 3D guy and back to the studio shot.”
If he had to peg the toughest scenario to put together, Boyd said it was when the large Guilala blew up the gas station. “That was combining a 3D monster, the 2D studio shot monster, 3D cars and a real explosion,” Boyd said. “It was challenging to bring together all of those effects in one shot.”
The entire job was done at 2K resolution, with colorist Stefan Sonnenfeld of Company 3, Santa Monica, going back and forth with Method Studios to achieve what Frisch describes as a “pristine color correct and composite.”
