Commercials were well represented at the Computer Animation Festival, a featured attraction during last week’s annual SIGGRAPH confab in Vancouver. Prominent in the mix were multiple spots from Psyop, New York, The Mill (with its NY and London shops each earning Fest inclusion) and LAIKA/house, Portland, Ore.
Meanwhile, scoring more than one entry on the feature front was Cinesite in the Visual Effects for Live Action portion of the Festival showcase. Citesite handled visual effects for Battle: Los Angeles (Columbia Pictures) and Clash of the Titans (Warner Bros.).
SHOOT queried artists at Psyop, The Mill, LAIKA/house and Cinesite regarding the prime creative challenges they faced on select projects screened at the Festival. For The Mill, UK, the Volkswagen “Black Beetle” commercial–directed by Dante Ariola of MJZ for Deutsch LA–made the Electronic Theater portion of the Fest. “Black Beetle” shows a beetle scurrying about, faster and more maneuverable than his colleagues and causing eyebrows to raise–even two preying mantises stop fighting to watch the beetle zip by. The spot served as an effective teaser for what will be the newly designed 2012 VW Beetle.
Tom Bussell, Head of 3D, The Mill, London, said of the challenges encountered on “Black Beetle,” “When a project is predominantly based around animation, clients have to take a huge leap of faith and trust us creatively as well as technically. The reality of such a quick turnaround and so much CGI in a spot like this for the new VW Beetle is that it only comes together the final few days in advance of the deadline. With the spot debuting during the Super Bowl, the pressure was really on.
“The biggest challenge we were presented with was getting the hero beetle model design just right. In a car commercial with no actual car there was a big design element to the beetle–we had to convey the right message about the car–so we needed our beetle to subtly reference the VW Bug’s new design without the insect feeling too engineered. Although our brief was to create an insect that behaved like a car, we felt it was really important to stay anatomically correct in order for the animation to be believable. Finally, in order to bring the spot to life, another big creative challenge we faced was ensuring all of the other FX going on around the action looked realistic.”
As for how The Mill met those challenges, Bussell related, “We created eight main insects and in cases like the mantis and ants, we tweaked each one to be unique. The base models were built in XSI and after the base models had been signed off, we took this model into ZBrush to sculpt the final level of detail. For all the other insects we just matched them to how nature intended them to be…
“If you look closely you can make out subtle shapes in the beetle’s shell that act as wheel arches, the eyes are headlamps and the silhouette from the profile is very similar to the new VW’s design. To achieve this, we studied various nature documentaries on insects, gathered lots of slow motion footage and built our digital insects with this in mind. On the flip side, we were also referencing iconic car chase scenes from movies. We had all sorts of references ranging from Starsky and Hutch, Fast and the Furious, The Matrix and of course, Bullet. Each shot of the commercial–from the framing of the shot to the animation of the beetle–is based around similar concepts to those iconic film moments.
“The next step to creating realistic insects was the texturing,” continued Bussell. “We wanted to go that extra step so we contacted The Natural History Museum in London as they have an extensive collection of insects. Hilary Warner, their assistant curator, helped us find the specific creatures we needed so we could take high-res photographs that would then be used to texture our CGI insects. We used a combination of these stills and hand painted textures in Photoshop to get the final result. We then took the model back into ZBrush to add the final level of detail that matched all the pores and imperfections of the texture itself. XSI and Mental Ray were used to render all of the insects.
“All of the background FX were done in Maya by a small team led by Johannes Richter. We added particle atmosphere to all the shots, anything from pollen to small flying insects to help bring the shots to life, so again we used references from all kinds of elements, such as radio-controlled cars skidding through dust to cars driving through the desert. We had to use some artistic licence here as an insect of that size in reality wouldn’t create that much dust kicking up. Barnsley and Darren Christie were the lead 2D compositors and both Flame and Nuke were used to composite the final shots. We also used Nuke to enhance the undergrowth and vegetation of the live-action backgrounds. The environment of one of the final shots in which the beetle is flying through the air was put together entirely in Nuke using still photos from the set.”
Mr. Peanut A pair of spots in the Planters campaign–“Holiday Party” and “Tree-athlon”–feature a contemporary Mr. Peanut character. Both stop motion commercials–which garnered Computer Animation Festival inclusion–had director Mark Gustafson from LAIKA/house collaborating with director Ringan Ledwidge of Smuggler for New York agency BEING. “Holiday Party” was the first spot in the campaign and it gave voice to the up until then silent Mr Peanut character.
Gustafson related to SHOOT, “I think the biggest challenge was getting the tone of the spots right. We wanted to leverage the long history of a character that everybody knows and at the same time do something with him that felt contemporary. So you ask yourself, ‘what do we hang on to and what do we let go of.’ In the case of Mr. Peanut, we tried to create a whole world that brought him up to date on his terms. This was reflected in everything from the art direction to camera work to the understated performance of the characters. Mr. Peanut has an old fashioned analog charm that’s in many ways analogous to the hand-made feel of the stop-motion process.”
Of his collaboration with Ledwidge, Gustafson said, “I enjoy working with live action directors; they can often bring a fresh perspective to the stop frame process. They tend to come in with fewer preconceived notions about how things ‘should be done’ and are generally more willing to challenge the thinking. Ringan was a very quick study when it came to stop motion. He felt comfortable pretty quickly and that made my job much easier. He was quite collaborative throughout the whole process. Much of what I did early on was help him understand both the limitations and the strength of working with puppets as opposed to actors.”
Psyop
Psyop had six entries make the grade for the Computer Animation Festival, five in tandem with Smuggler: AT&T’s “A Whole New World” for BBDO NY; Fage yogurt’s “Plain” for Mullen, Boston; Fanta’s “Bounce” out of Ogilvy NY; LG Electronics’ “Something’s Lurking” via Y&R NY; and Xbox Fable III videogame’s “Revolution” out of agencytwofifteen, San Francisco. Additionally Psyop had a solo entry: Schweppes Spring Valley’s “Spring Fever” for George Patterson Y&R, Melbourne, Australia.
SHOOT sought out Laurent Ledru, creative director for Psyop on “Spring Fever” and “Revolution,” and a designer on “Spring Fever.”
Both spots take us to dramatically different worlds. Spring fever shows us a budding springtime replete with flora and fawna set to the Elvis Presley rendition of “Spring Fever.” The spring season comes alive and is captured in a Spring Valley bottle. Meanwhile, the CG “Revolution” is set in the Fable III game’s fictional land of Albion and centers on the overthrow of a tyrannical monarch.
Ledru noted that whereas Psyop sought additional inspiration for “Revolution”–which took the form of his looking back on the work of master painters to capture the spirit and depiction of a historical revolution–“Spring Fever” by contrast had its inspiration built in, namely the soundtrack which was provided to Psyop from the outset.
Starting with an empty bottle and then filling it with a collection of imagery depicting the spring season seemed to develop naturally, observed Ledru who developed a treatment and “found a narrative” based on the song.
The common bond, though, for both commercials, remarked Ledru was a positive collaboration with the clients and agency creatives, which helps to meet any creative challenge.
Blowing smoke
Ben Shepherd was Cinesite’s VFX supervisor on the feature Battle: Los Angeles. “The biggest challenge,” he said, “was creating the donut-shaped smoke rings that are seen at the beginning of the movie during the meteor attack/alien landing. They were actually inspired by an explosion on set in Louisiana. They were filming some huge explosions and one of them resulted in a perfect smoke ring, about 20 meters across, floating up into the sky. Everett Burrel, the production’s VFX supervisor, said, ‘If you made that in CG, no one would believe it.’ Then Jonathan Liebesman, the director, came over and said excitedly: ‘I want that in my movie!’ So we were set the challenge to replicate it.
“Jonathan’s idea for incorporating the rings,” continued Shepherd, “was that they were a retro-thruster mechanism that would activate in the meteors to slow them down before landing in the ocean. They’re an important story point that suggests that these ‘meteorites’ aren’t actually meteorites at all, but some type of alien ship. They had to look dramatic but realistic.
“An extremely talented FX TD, Claire Pegorier, spent a long time to get them just right. She used standard Maya Fluids to build the effect. The initial explosion was created using fast-moving particle fluids. The smoke was created using fluid emitting from a torus surface, driven by a torus volume Axis Field to force the fluid to rotate. Various other processes were applied to give the rings an irregular and more natural look, to simulate the process of time on the rings and to collapse them.”
