It’s not yet a game of 52 pick-up but portions of the housing market in the U.K. are tantamount to houses of cards that are falling, with each representing another resident or family having to relocate or worse becoming homeless for an extended period.
In this public service spot for housing and homelessness charity organization Shelter, we see the cards ending up scattered across an anywhere town in the U.K., our perspective being seemingly that of a passenger glancing out the window of a moving train.
At first the view appears to be a typical urban landscape. But as we move past the various houses and blocks, the camera reveals that some are constructed from giant playing cards. Furthermore, several of these houses of cards are falling apart, the cards tumbling off and away in slow motion.
Combined with a melancholy, repetitive piano, synth and percussion accompaniment (drawn from Radiohead’s song, “Videotape,” on the “In Rainbows” album), the effect is powerful and moving, an eloquent visual metaphor for the fragility of the housing situation for many in the current economy.
The last house of cards we see is not a single flat but rather a towering apartment building, the top of which is disintegrating before our eyes.
A voiceover ( from actress Samantha Morton) then relates, “An estimated 75,000 homes will be repossessed this year. The housing crisis is real. Please help Visit shelter.org.uk.”
Gimme Shelter Dom & Nic of Outsider, London, directed this pro bono PSA, “House of Cards,” for Shelter out of Leo Burnett, London. (Dom & Nic–a.k.a. Nicholas Goffey and Dominic Hawley–are repped stateside for commercials and music videos by Los Angeles-based Oil Factory.)
The Shelter organization offers intervention and assistance to those people hit hard by the housing crisis, and serves as a lobbying force for legislative and community reforms.
Framestore, London, donated its services, creating low-key yet impactful visual effects that were integral to the concept. Framestore’s visual effects supervisors on the job were long-time Dom & Nic collaborator, VFX supervisor Ben Cronin, and CG lead/3D technical director Simon French.
“We shot the raw material over one day on the line between Shepherd’s Bush Market and Goldhawk Road stations,” said Cronin, “We had very little time and had to take whichever trains came along. We only had about five takes in all–and the sun was going in and out, there were camera problems on one take. So it was a little hectic. The nature of the shot we wanted, and the effects we were going to be adding, meant that it had to be done as one take.”
Some of the buildings that are made of cards were positioned over existing buildings which meant in some cases that they had to be completely removed, while others–such as the final tower block (a tall apartment building)–were inserted into available gaps in the landscape. Whichever, Cronin had plenty of alterations, tidying up, and a lot of roto, all in addition to the compositing of the card structures and their collapsing constituent elements.
Playing Cards
These cards–their construction, their collapsing, and their lighting–were the sole responsibility of French. “I was involved from the concept stage,” said French, “And once I knew what they’d need, I was able to do some research and groundwork into the most efficient way of constructing these card houses. Much of this was scripted to make sure that simulation and render geometry matched after each revision. Although at first glance it might look like a straightforward ‘rigid bodies falling into each other’ problem, the sheer number of cards involved meant that Maya could have had problems handling the data. In the end I used Maya’s nCloth for the simulation, and the cards were rendered with Mental Ray. nCloth is primarily designed to create flowing cloths, garments and the like, so cards were not strictly what it’s meant for. But it’s quite an open system and it served my purposes very well, being a very rugged solver. Each card becomes the face of a polygon, with the whole building the complete object, which makes the whole simulation much more manageable.”
The Burnett team included creative director Jonathan Burley, creatives Daniel Fisher, Pete Gosselin, Richard Brim and Jay Hunt, and producer Graeme Light.
Jon Madsen produced for Outsider. Tom Townend was the DP.
