The answer can sometimes be found by going back in time to one's roots. And this Liberty Group Limited spot, titled "The Answer," for Johannesburg agency FoxP2 does just that in a visual tour de force that winds its way back through the decades.
Visual effects studio Digital Domain teamed with director Adrian De Sa Garces of Velocity Films in Johannesburg and Cape Town on this reverse time-lapse piece which takes viewers from one of the most economically successful square miles in all of South Africa–the glittering jewel of commerce known as Sandton City–to show its creation as it sprung from the vision of Liberty investors in 1973. It's a remarkable evolution and transformation as we see from whence this development came and find that it was indeed built from the ground up.
The :60 is completely computer generated except for the live-action shot of the founders and their classic car at the very end of the spot. Director De Sa Garces and the Digital Domain ensemble, led by visual effects supervisor James Atkinson, set out to re-create the city blocks. As the original buildings were designed and built in a period pre-dating computer-assisted design (CAD), there were no CAD models, few blueprints, and in the ever-changing area, even Google Street View was out of date and didn't show the most current skyline.
Proving resourceful
So the Digital Domain had to be resourceful and fill in the considerable gaps to take viewers through a reasonably accurate trip through time. Digital Domain artisans took to the streets and skies of Johannesburg, surveying the five city blocks of Sandton City with photogrammetry and creating a 3D reconstructed model. From that data they were able to create CG buildings that they could then deconstruct–including dimensions, textures, workers, tools, props, piles of lumber, scaffolding and bricks, customized to each building.
Because the lighting and skies had to be continuously moving, the Digital Domain ensemble created time lapse clouds, realistic sunrises and weather changes, animating them along with the buildings. To create these effects, the team built a virtual sky and atmosphere in Terragen, an environmental simulation tool. This was augmented with time-lapse photography shot from atop the main office tower.
One of the most striking visuals in the piece is a time-lapse tree. To create that Digital Domain used SpeedTree, software that provides tools for procedurally growing trees.
The piece is a detailed, intricate story of how this patch of real estate grew from an unremarkable suburb of Johannesburg into one of the richest city blocks in all of South Africa.
“Mickey 17” Tops Weekend Box Office, But Profitability Is A Long Way Off
"Parasite" filmmaker Bong Joon Ho's original science fiction film "Mickey 17" opened in first place on the North American box office charts. According to studio estimates Sunday, the Robert Pattinson-led film earned $19.1 million in its first weekend in theaters, which was enough to dethrone "Captain America: Brave New World" after a three-week reign.
Overseas, "Mickey 17" has already made $34.2 million, bringing its worldwide total to $53.3 million. But profitability for the film is a long way off: It cost a reported $118 million to produce, which does not account for millions spent on marketing and promotion.
A week following the Oscars, where "Anora" filmmaker Sean Baker made an impassioned speech about the importance of the theatrical experience – for filmmakers to keep making movies for the big screens, for distributors to focus on theatrical releases and for audiences to keep going – "Mickey 17" is perhaps the perfect representation of this moment in the business, or at least an interesting case study. It's an original film from an Oscar-winning director led by a big star that was afforded a blockbuster budget and given a robust theatrical release by Warner Bros., one of the few major studios remaining. But despite all of that, and reviews that were mostly positive (79% on RottenTomatoes), audiences did not treat it as an event movie, and it may ultimately struggle to break even.
Originally set for release in March 2024, Bong Joon Ho's follow-up to the Oscar-winning "Parasite" faced several delays, which he has attributed to extenuating circumstances around the Hollywood strikes. Based on the novel "Mickey7" by Edward Ashton, Pattinson plays an expendable employee who dies on missions and is re-printed time and time again. Steven... Read More