By Adam Remson

When watching film, there are the details you see and hear, and there are those you sense. The latter are vital to a film’s success—they suspend disbelief and secure the fourth wall. While there may be an esoteric French or German word that best describes this side of film appreciation, in English one could call it the ghost of hard work—the specter of someone’s heart and soul in details that no one will ever "see." Fortunately, for those who toil over details, their work does not go unnoticed.

In the case of Levi’s "Odyssey," out of Bartle Bogle Hegarty (BBH), London, it is these unseen details that keep an excellent idea from falling flat. The concept, driven by BBH creative director Stephen Butler, puts a young couple into one fantastic minute of film. In the spot a man and woman are so free, so enabled and, as a result, so powerful, that they can literally run through walls and defy gravity. "Odyssey" director, Jonathan Glazer, of Academy, London, uses his vision of this very stylized world to pull the audience into this impossible scene. And that vision has paid off. "Odyssey" has garnered a slew of industry awards, including a Gold Lion at the Cannes International Advertising Festival; inclusion in the newly created international category at the Association of Independent Commercial Producers (AICP) Show; and a Gold Pencil at the One Show. The latest honor for "Odyssey" is inclusion in the Animation Theater at the upcoming SIGGRAPH convention in San Antonio, Texas (see SIGGRAPH Preview story, p. 1).

But concepts and vision only achieve so much and in the end, it is the level of execution that sells the spot. Artists at Framestore CFC, London, the postproduction/visual effects house behind the startling animation and special effects in "Odyssey," put painstaking detail into things like wall cracks visible only for a fraction of a second of screen time.

"Odyssey" opens on a young man. His expression is desperate and willful. A sad, solitary violin—actually the sounds of Hendel’s "Sarabande"—is the only noise heard in the dialogue-free spot. Urgently, the man turns and sprints through a door and straight at an interior wall. The violin continues to play, with no change in tempo or mood. We watch from behind, as he leaps at the wall like a hurdler and breaks through in a cloud of plaster dust and debris. The camera takes up the chase and soon is riding alongside as the young man breaks through two more walls. A moment later, a young woman on a similar quest joins him. Side-by-side they explode through walls together and a full orchestra takes up the violin’s melody.

The explosions of the walls represented Framestore CFC’s first challenge. Since actually setting explosives on walls was ruled out, the explosions had to be created using computer graphics (CG). "When we were in pre-production with Jonathan Glazer," recounts Markus Manninen, CGI supervisor on "Odyssey," "what we found out was [Glazer] wanted all the camera work to be very intimate—handheld and moving with them through the walls. If the explosions were physical, there would have been so many restrictions. So we decided early on that the only way we would be able to achieve his vision of this fantastic run was to actually create it all in CG. So the actors were actually running through big gaps in the walls that we then filled in with computer graphics."

For this job, Framestore CFC chose Alias|Wavefront’s Maya as the workhorse handling nearly all the animation and special effects. "About two or three years ago, we started using Maya more and more as a main tool on projects," explains Manninen. "Because [‘Odyssey’] was such an effects-oriented production, but also needed a lot of integration between animation and effects, Maya was the obvious choice for the whole production pipeline."

But blowing up walls in "Odyssey" is not as simple as pressing an "Explode" button in Maya. Manninen and his team had to recreate explosions in order for them to look real. "Even though they look like real explosions," he explains, "that is not how a wall would explode. [The explosions in ‘Odyssey’ are] ‘Jonathan Glazer explosions.’ They had to be very specific to be convincing."

For Framestore CFC "a Jonathan Glazer explosion" meant setting certain parameters for how the walls fall away from the actors. "If you watch the ad," continues Manninen, "it is really about them pushing the wall in front of them as they are running. They are so quick and forceful that the wall sort of crumbles as they run through it."

Using Maya also allowed the Framestore CFC team to automate some of the explosions and still maintain an organic look. "A big part of why we wanted to use Maya was there are a few features that we want to explore," explains Manninen. "One was ‘proceduralism’ [a technique where the computer handles some of the repeated tasks to save time]. Originally, we developed a system that completely, in steps, automated the process of getting a wall to explode, but we ended up having to go back and hand-animate what the pieces and the explosions would look like. But we still had a procedural base that allowed us to [automate] a lot of it."

With over 20 explosions in the :60, the artists at Framestore CFC had to employ all the timesaving tricks they could find. Still though, the spot took seven months—from pre-visualization through post—to complete. "The hard part was getting the look right," says Manninen. "We felt we had a commercial after five months but decided that we wanted it perfect. We felt we were so close and just needed to keep on doing some extra tweaks."

When the young couple finishes crashing through the interior walls, the music abruptly drops back to the single violin. We see them walking slowly, side-by-side in a stairwell. They stare into each other’s eyes and seem to understand what is coming next. The scene cuts to the apartment building exterior as they burst through the brick façade, and race for the surrounding forest. The man and woman are seemingly more energized and the commercial itself follows suit—the orchestra returns; the edits come in double-time. They run up the side of two of the forest’s most massive trees, hurdling branches and swatting leaves from their paths. Amazingly, they seem to accelerate as they reach the treetops and then, as if the trees were launching ramps, the two, in slow motion, surge into the overcast sky, eventually moving through outer space. The spot’s tag then appears: Lev’s Engineered Jeans. Freedom to move.

Outside the Box

The forest presented its own challenges as it, too, was created entirely inside a computer. "We were doing a full CG forest—made up of not just trees, but ‘Jonathan Glazer trees.’ " These special trees Manninen and his team created had to convincingly resemble ones in nature, but also had to be suitable for a person to run on. "We actually ended up combining different wood types to create the trees. We designed all the textures and layers on NURB] Non-Uniform Rational B-Splines—industry standard tools for the representation and design of geometry] surfaces."

Framestore CFC artisans created new trees to suit the action and the style of the spot and for the same reasons, created an original forest. "After we had the two trees created for the man and the woman, we had to create a library of trees with different hides, different amounts of branches and leaves and varying thickness," explains Manninen. "This library was then placed out across the forest and obviously, became a huge amount of data, so we ended up rendering every tree separately. Then in compositing them, it was possible to add and subtract trees to get the layout of the forest perfect."

To place the tree’s leaves in a random and organic fashion, Framestore CFC’s artists used Maya’s "painterly effects." The effect manages the leaves by putting them in the scene only at render time. This means the artists could work in a simple scene without choking the computer’s processors with unnecessary data, as well as save time by letting the computer design an organic-looking forest.

Finally, so it didn’t appear as if the characters were running through a painting, Framestore CFC had to add dynamic qualities to the forest. "Our R&D department developed a tool that simulated wind through the forest," Manninen explains. "So you could have wind starting at the top of the tree and then carry through the forest down to the bottom. Wind isn’t completely random, it actually has a life to it."

Besides Maya, Framestore CFC used Inferno for all the compositing and sky painting. Three Inferno artists—Murray Butler, Stephane Allender and Mark Nelmes—contributed to the project at different times. For rendering, Maya Render and Mental Ray were used in conjunction to work as expeditiously as possible. Finally, proprietary software was written specifically for "Odyssey" to manage the database, automate tasks like placing trees in the forest and, to create the aforementioned wind through the trees.

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