Ask Aaron Baxter and Alex Catchpoole, VFX supervisors at New York-based Guava what the latest “look” is in visual effects and they’ll say, “no look at all.” What they mean by that is that the maturation of visual effects has manifested itself in effects that, though incredible, are largely invisible to the viewer’s eye.
“More than ever, visual effects have moved into a realist phase,” says Catchpoole. “The best ‘effects’ are now largely invisible; they drive the story and are not there just for impact. You can have something totally unreal happening, but the look now is realism.”
He cites Guava’s work for Suncom Wireless. A woman flippantly complains about her cellular provider’s long distance restrictions and phones a far away friend anyway unaware of what the consequences might be–in this case a giant hawk swoops down and carries her off.
“The scenario could hardly be more unbelievable, but its execution makes it seem very realistic,” says Baxter. “It’s an utterly bizarre idea, but it is captured on film as if it just happened. That is what today’s visual effects are like: very much of-the-moment, getting viewers involved so that they actually will suspend their disbelief for a moment.”
Like Guava, other visual effects houses are painstakingly working to create spots that people see as natural and not as effects commercials. In the following examples, SHOOT discovered they are up for the challenge.
“Stress Monster”
Remember when Calgon bath gel took you away from stressful situations? In a new spot called “Stress Monster,” out of Element 79 Partners, Chicago, Propel Fitness Water is today’s Calgon. In the commercial a man literally runs his stress off while jogging through the city fueled by his Propel drink.
The spot opens with a monster made of things representing external concerns–an unhappy boss, an ambulance, a crying baby–running through the streets of a city to the tune of “Under Pressure” by Queen. As the monster moves through the skyscrapers, its components shed one by one to reveal a man jogging along peacefully. A female voiceover says, “Fit has a feeling–and a water: Propel Fitness Water.”
The spot makes you believe there really is such a thing as a stress monster in that he looks so real thanks to VFX house Asylum, Santa Monica. One of the things the client wanted to make sure of was that the monster was very dense and the objects had to be recognizable as stressful objects. A list of 170 different objects had to be modeled.
The VFX team started with a simple skeleton animation running down the street to get a sense of scaling and pace and imported that from Maya into Houdini. They took advantage of Houdini’s ability to procedurally and dynamically animate objects on top of the base animation. “We realized it would be best if the character animators hand animated the head and the feet. Those two pieces were kind of the bookends of the monster and they were imported in Houdini and then Houdini tools were used to procedurally fill in the rest,” explains Mitch Drain, visual effects supervisor. “Once we had a base monster represented by taxi cabs and ambulances, etc., every time we imported new animation it was automatically applied to that.”
“One of the challenges was figuring out how the shedding was actually going to work technically. At the beginning of the spot the monster was 90 feet tall. And by the end of the spot he’s about 12 feet tall. So all of a sudden you can’t have a 12-foot tall guy with an ambulance on his back,” relates Sean Faden, CG supervisor. “Any time we had the big monster, our animators would trick him down over the course of a shot and that would help us dictate what objects would have to get lost. Whatever objects were hurting the humanoid form would be the ones we would suggest tossing off.”
Faden says they used Houdini’s Rigid Body Dynamics System to control the amount of shedding. In each shot they told the system which objects were going to fall off and it would naturally, along with the motion of the monster, throw the objects off and bounce them off the ground.
“It’s a pretty new feature. It’s been being developed over the last couple of years but it’s really coming into its own the last six months,” Faden says.
Drain and Faden are grateful for being able to work with director Baker Smith of harvest films, Santa Monica “He usually works with more character-driven things,” notes Drain. “He put a lot of faith in us and we genuinely appreciate that.”
A “Window of Opportunity” VFX and animation studio Framestore, N.Y. recently teamed with BBDO, Smuggler, New York, and directorial team Stylewar to create an optimistic spot for Bank of America. Central to the realistic, idealistic spot is a window version of the Bank of America logo hovering mysteriously over a city street. Curious passersby approach the “window” and peer through, seeing their fondest dreams realized.
“Getting this magical window to look real, not dream-like, was a quite a challenge,” says Theo Jones, VFX supervisor. “We started with a reflective chrome look with very sharp edges, but after deciding it stood out too much, we changed the look to a matte black and smoothed the edges down.”
Creating the dream world within the window was no easy task either. It needed to look like it was a pane of glass away from being real. “There had to be a clear, realistic delineation between the real and dream worlds that still felt very human,” explains Murray Butler, VFX supervisor and lead flame artist. “We painstakingly graded each individual vignette to correspond to each person’s dream. To remind people that they are still looking through a window, we added fingerprints and a slight prism effect.”
Tools used included Maya, Shake, Boujou and Flame.
“Stairs”
To deliver a modern take on the famous “Odessa Steps” sequence from Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin in the new Coke spot out of Wieden + Kennedy, Portland, Ore., West Hollywood-based A52‘s photoreal CGI and seamless VFX artistry played important roles.
In the spot, a man running through a train station bumps into another man, who just opened his bottle of coke. The Coke bottle cap flies out of his hand and begins bouncing down the steps. In despair, he watches it tumble, and then envisions it as the flat screen TV he longs to have when he earns enough My CokeRewards points. The bouncing cap morphs into other objects that onlookers are fantasizing about when they see the cap cascading by. When it rolls to a halt, a crowd of people race to it.
When A52 started the project, the VFX team was only supposed to create CGI Coke bottle caps bouncing down the steps. The other tumbling elements (flat screen monitor, guitar, paintball gun, vintage Coke cooler, golf clubs, DVDs, and rubber dog toy) were supposed to be in-camera. But director Jason Smith of Bob Industries, Santa Monica, decided to shoot them as separate passes for control and safety issues. A52 re-created all the falling elements but one in CGI to achieve the desired angle and trajectory or to add in a specific prop that production hadn’t been able to obtain.
“In the final piece every shot has some visual effects from simple clean up to rebuilding whole shots in post,” says Andy Hall, visual effects supervisor. The CGI team included Kirk Shintani, Paulo de Almada and Chris Janney.
Patrick Murphy, visual effects supervisor and Inferno/Flame artist, and Hall choreographed the objects to create a continuous tumbling, bouncing movement from beginning to end of the spot. Each CGI element went up to Murphy in Inferno to see them in context of the individual shot and the spot as a whole. There was a lot of back and forth to achieve a continuous tumbling, bouncing movement through the entire spot. In addition to Inferno the team relied on Maya, mental ray and Shake.
“The biggest challenges were the time constraints on the job, creating continuity of action that communicated the idea of these people seeing their own rewards tumbling down the stairs and taking a variety of very different objects and creating a continuous and believable action throughout the spot,” Hall relates.
Animators, Artists Take On Leading Roles Hall also points out that A52’s involvement in this particular project came early on with the agency and director, a trend that Guava’s Catchpoole is thrilled about. He says more and more directors are also calling them in at the storyboard stage. “We’re definitely considered to be in more of an advisory role than in the past. We’re very happy that effects have become such a vital part of production,” he says.
In the case of a recent animated spot for PODS Moving and Storage Company out of WestWayne, Method Studios, Santa Monica, was certainly vital to production–VFX artist Cedric Nicolas and CG creative director Laurent Ledru actually helmed the work.
“The gap between visual effects and directing is getting smaller and smaller. There are a lot of spots out there that rely so much on visual effects and also there is less time and less money to achieve things,” says Nicolas.
The agency approached Method with a copy-intensive brief for the spot, which suggested shooting in Buffalo, Arizona and North Dakota. The catch was they needed results in just a few weeks.
The duo decided to use shoot live action and stop motion to make it easier to cover all the copy and be believable and to give it a quirky tone. To complement that style, they decided to have the people appear in a papery pop-up book world.
Instead of shooting the actors against green screen and then creating the animated background, they shot them live-action and stop motion in front of a real house. Due to the production schedule limitations, they shot in front of houses in Downey Studios in Los Angeles. Afterwards they rotoscoped all of the people and the moving boxes out of the scenes and recreated the environments in 3D with Maya.
“The problem with shooting against green screen is you always feel like the people don’t belong in the scene. But it looks like they belong to this world. They don’t look composited in front of it,” says Nicolas.
Like Method Studios, New York animation house Charlex had a leading role in msnbc.com’s first branding campaign since its inception. The creative team from SS+K, New York, showed them a colored spectrum in print and wanted to know how to illustrate the journey and multiple perspectives of news and entertainment that consumers could explore on the site. “From the get go we were pitching them ideas of how to express that,” recalls Richard Eng, creative director.
The resulting spot called “Spectrum” showcases a color spectrum of panels moving in a wavelike motion that comes alive with animations to illustrate the breadth of content and multimedia on the site. The technical challenge was creating the sea of panels–there were 750,000 to work with–representing eight different news topics in 360 different shades and having them appear as one long seamless shot.
To make it more manageable for the designers, Supervising TD/Effects Seth Lippman explains that they split the spot into eight different shots. They used mental ray but also wrote custom plug-ins so they could manipulate the tiles in any way the designers needed to and so the animators could be flexible in their approach. Each different topic within the spot took a different technical approach. The tornado, for example, was a mix of rigging and particles.
The custom plug-ins also made it possible to have the spectrum feel as though it was constantly changing colors but stick to the requirement that each panel was a specific color with no gradient on any panel.
“We didn’t employ any of the traditional tricks of matte painting or projected textures. Every tile you see is a specific piece of geometry, and we came up with ways to put these tiles on all different types of surfaces. Sometimes the surfaces move like waves, sometimes there are cars driving over the surfaces,” explains Lippman.
Lippman notes that this was a huge collaborative effort. Sungtae Will Kim, art director, Anthony Tabtong, animation director, and DRIVER, New York, producer Becky Reagan were integral to the success of the spot.
Speaking of collaboration, Guava’s Catchpoole points out that like directors, crews are understanding effects are an integral part of the process now. “Every project, people who are used to dealing with live actors and elements are learning more about what we do and what we need. We’re better at dealing with them and they’re better at dealing with us and at the end of the day everything is much more efficient, not to mention friendlier,” affirms Baxter.
