Talking horses in a stable express their decided preference for Kellogg’s Nutri-Grain Bars over the same old mundane bag of oats. Besides verbalizing, the horses can also stand upright like humans but revert to normal equine behavior whenever a person enters the barn.
The “normal behavior” includes the horses pretending that they love the oats in their feed bags. But as soon as man leaves the stable, we see a horse spit out the oats and ask for a sparkling water to wash the bad taste from his mouth.
Filip Engstrom directed “Horse’s Mouth” in a coproduction between bicoastal Smuggler and London’s Stink for Leo Burnett, London. RIOT Santa Monica’s animation team handled visual effects and CG, with U.K.’s Creature Effects building and operating animatronic horses, which were used on the set to create the animals’ positioning and general movement. The movement of the horses’ lips, eyes an dears were produced via CG.
RIOT scanned the animatronic horses and used the data to model and texture 3D versions whose features could be more subtly and precisely controlled. CG artists also created the lower half of a horse for a scene in which the animal is standing on its hind legs while calling a warning to his mates.
“The animatronic horse was built from the chest up and placed over the head of a human operator,” explained RIOT visual effects producer Robert Owen. “The operator had to stand on a platform to create the proper space between the horse’s chest and the ground. In post, we removed the platform and the operator’s legs and composited in a CG element.”
The Leo Burnett, London, team included creative director Billy Mawhinney, art director Monty Verdi, and producer Graeme Light.
The DP was Crille Forsberg. Editor was Nick Lofting of Union Editorial, Santa Monica.
Supreme Court Seems Likely To Uphold A Law That Could Force TikTok To Shut Down On Jan. 19
The Supreme Court on Friday seemed likely to uphold a law that would ban TikTok in the United States beginning Jan. 19 unless the popular social media program is sold by its China-based parent company.
Hearing arguments in a momentous clash of free speech and national security concerns, the justices seemed persuaded by arguments that the national security threat posed by the company's connections to China override concerns about restricting the speech either of TikTok or its 170 million users in the United States.
Early in arguments that lasted more than two and a half hours, Chief Justice John Roberts identified his main concern: TikTok's ownership by China-based ByteDance and the parent company's requirement to cooperate with the Chinese government's intelligence operations.
If left in place, the law passed by bipartisan majorities in Congress and signed by President Joe Biden in April will require TikTok to "go dark" on Jan. 19, lawyer Noel Francisco told the justices on behalf of TikTok.
At the very least, Francisco urged, the justices should enter a temporary pause that would allow TikTok to keep operating. "We might be in a different world again" after President-elect Donald Trump takes office on Jan. 20. Trump, who has 14.7 million followers on TikTok, also has called for the deadline to be pushed back to give him time to negotiate a "political resolution." Francisco served as Trump's solicitor general in his first presidential term.
But it was not clear whether any justices would choose such a course. And only Justice Neil Gorsuch sounded like he would side with TikTok to find that the ban violates the Constitution.
Gorsuch labeled arguments advanced by the Biden administration' in defense of the law a... Read More