SHORT CUTS
Janimation, a Dallas-based animation company, recently teamed up with Pennzoil to produce a :30 in the motor oil company’s current ad campaign via Publicis Sanchez & Levitan, Dallas. Titled "Tunnel," the spot depicts a tunnel coming to life and demolishing any large vehicles not using Pennzoil motor oil, while letting those trucks using the oil safely through the passage. Once Janimation received the rough boards, Janimation animation director Greg Punchatz, live-action director Andrews Jenkins and DP Joe Meade of Food Chain Films, Portland, Ore., created a pre-visualization prior to shooting at a tunnel on location in the Colorado mountains. Punchatz and Janimation compositor/editor Alex Neuman created digital backgrounds to enhance and, at times, completely replace the environment surrounding the action. This process allowed flexibility in the camera set up for the trucks approach to the tunnel’s mouth. The visual effects list included texture projections, 3-D environment replacements, fog, vultures, flaming tires and debris, as well as complete 3-D digital truck and product replacements. Visual effects were supervised by Janimation’s Steve Gaçonnier and effects animator Lyn Caudle, both of Janimation. Additional Janimation credits go to visual effects/postproduction producer Pete Herzog, animator John McInnis, technical director Ludovick Michaud, and compositors Jenni Hudgens and Jana Oleksinski. "Tunnel" is the second teaming up between Janimation and Pennzoil. Janimation produced the initial commercial in the campaign, "Guardians in the Alcove."
Deep Blue Sea, Miami, worked with Silversea Cruises to produce the first-ever commercial for the elite cruise line. Deep Blue Sea’s creative director David Woodward and designer Kyle Reynolds worked with the Silversea creative team to bring to life a concept incorporating evocative black-and-white still images depicting on-board lifestyle shots and destination scenes. Reynolds later animated the images in After Effects to the vocal soundtrack "Amado Mio" by Pink Martini. In one version, subtle floating titles were added to emphasize key words such as "above" and "beyond." Reynolds worked on a combination of Mac After Effects and Discreet’s Flame, while audio engineer Lenny Rabinowitz mixed the spot in Manhattan Transfer Miami’s ProTools suite. There are two versions of the commercial: one with audio, which aired in New York and Los Angeles, and one with supers, which was viewed in Times Square during the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade. Deep Blue Sea’s Nadia Bowen line produced the job. Deep Blue Sea, which is a division of Manhattan Transfer Miami, Coconut Grove, Fla., is a design, visual effects and animation house servicing national and international networks, advertising agencies and production companies.
Bicoastal Imaginary Forces (IF), created the open for two recent features. IF creative director Karin Fong and the IF team took a whimsical, book-inspired approach to the children’s classic Dr. Seuss’ The Cat in the Hat, and entered the Disney theme-park manor that serves as the setting and basis for The Haunted Mansion. For Dr. Seuss’ The Cat in the Hat, director Bo Welch and producer/star Mike Myers wanted to create excitement by immediately evoking the familiar qualities of the book. Thus, the film begins with "Seussified" logos of Universal Pictures, DreamWorks Pictures and Imagine Entertainment, all rendered in Seuss’ illustration style and color palette. The camera then takes the viewer past the tale’s iconic kite, dress and fish, sailing through 2-D "paper" clouds that part and open up in the idyllic town where the story begins. For the Eddie Murphy feature The Haunted Mansion, IF’s team created a dreamlike opener that served as a prologue, interweaving footage with ghostly visions to recount the tragic love story that transformed the mansion into a haunted estate. IF had collaborated with feature director Rob Minkoff previously, working on the title sequences for Stuart Little and its sequel. Additional IF credits include designer Charles Khoury.
MUSIC NOTES
Eleven, Santa Monica, completed the audio mix and sound design for Kovel/Fuller Advertising, Culver City, Calif., and client Vivendi Universal Games. "Hero Game Footage" and "Glitch-Col. Alloy" (:30s) launch the new video game, "Metal Arms: Glitch in the System," using CGI created by Blur Studios, Venice, Calif. Eleven’s Mike Greenberg was mixer/sound designer, with Chris Devcich as assistant mixer/sound designer.
San Rafael, Calif.-based Cordovan Music completed the scoring of 15 spots for Butler, Shine & Stern, Sausalito, Calif., and its client, LEAP Wireless. The commercials promote the company’s new Cricket Wireless plan and cell phone. Each ad features a different style of music, ranging from accordion breakbeat to alien doo-wop to jazzy bossa nova. Cordovan also recently completed music for the launch of Ubisoft’s "XIII" espionage video game. The action-oriented game and spots feature a retro comic book cell appearance, as well as a voiceover from actor David Duchovny. Cordovan composer Greg Reeves scored the spots with a ’70s cop-show funk vibe. Other recent work completed by Cordovan includes music for Pottery Barns’ new teen site interactive product demos, and corporate sound design and Web music for Verisign’s "Security Will Set You Free" campaign.
IN GEAR
FOX Sports has installed a major new server-based editing system built around Quantel‘s generationQ technology at its Sydney headquarters. At the new system’s heart are four fully specced QEdit Pro nonlinear editing machines supported by eight QCut editing seats, all of which in turn hook into four Quantel sQServers providing 290 hours of storage at 30Mb iFrame. The new server-based system at FOX is augmented by two sQfx live playout control panels, one for each of FOX Sports’ studios, and joins the QPaintbox Pro broadcast video design system FOX bought earlier in 2003. Quantel is headquartered in Newbury, U.K., and maintains offices in the U.S., mainland Europe, Hong Kong, Japan, Korea and Australia.
Rochester, N.Y.-based George Eastman House International Museum of Photography and Film has added da Vinci Systems‘ revival film restoration system to its new digital restoration laboratory. Housed within George Eastman House’s The L. Jeffrey Selznick School of Film Preservation, the digital restoration lab now will include the revival system powered by the Silicon Graphics Octane2 visual workstation. The integrated solution will give the school staff an additional outlet for providing hands-on training in film preservation and restoration techniques. Guidance in the use of the revival and Octane2 products will become a part of the Selznick School’s standard curriculum and will enable students to further their expertise in the preservation discipline. Students have the opportunity for hands-on restoration work on select films from Eastman House’s motion picture collections. These collections include more than 25,000 titles from 1895 to present; 10,000 movie posters; more than three million film stills, posters, lobby cards, scripts, and scores; personal film collections from several major film icons; as well as a collection of silent films. Significant film restoration projects handled by Eastman House in recent years include Snow White (1916), John Barrymore’s Sherlock Holmes (1922), Cecil B. DeMille’s Ten Commandments (1923), and The Lost World (1925). Da Vinci’s revival runs on the Octane2 visual workstation with local video I/O and storage, and includes da Vinci’s PowerHouse hardware acceleration system. The revival restoration system contains both automatic processing and interactive tools for removing dust, scratches, and other blemishes, and for correcting other problems such as significant color fading. Also included in da Vinci’s restoration system is direct, real-time access to the attached storage arrays and simultaneous access to any image clip. Silicon Graphics’ Octane2 visual workstation combines the VPro 3-D graphics system with 48-bit RGBA, a balanced system architecture, and MIPS processors. Octane2 delivers a suite of options, including the DMediaPro DM2 video option for a high-definition desktop solution.
CLIPLAND
Peter Zavadil directed "Cool to be A Fool," for country music artist Joe Nichols. The music video, which debuted on CMT in November, features Nichols finding himself in a TV show called Hot Date, where he is put in a series of uncomfortable and compromising dating situations, complete with thought bubbles and commentaries. He is also later subjected to a retro warped version of The Dating Game, hosted by Bob Eubanks. Zavadil is repped for music videos by Nashville-based Picture Vision, and for commercials by Darcy/Fox Productions, Santa Monica.
