SHORT CUTS
New York-based Guava produced a snow globe effect for Mercedes-Benz’s "Winter Objects," via Merkley Newman Harty|Partners, New York. Guava artists collaborated with director Henrik Hansen of Aero Film, Santa Monica, to create the globe and several other digital composites. The :30’s snow globe sequence features a collection of domes lined up on a window ledge. The camera tracks across a desk toward the globes, focusing on one in which four miniature Mercedes-Benz sedans are housed. As the snow swirls around the cars inside the dome, the camera tracks in and through the glass, revealing the vehicles lined up with snow falling around them. The cars were taken from still photographs, the snow-covered trees behind the vehicles were shot in Guava’s studio. The snow globe, swirling snow and reflections on the glass were all 3-D elements combined in Inferno. Guava visual effects supervisor Alex Catchpoole added chromatic distortion, lens distortion and a lens flare to build the illusion of the cars under glass. In another scene, a bright summer day in the ski fields had to be transformed into a full winter snowscape. Hansen shot the live-action plate of a chairlift rising up over a hill on location at Bear Mountain in California, but the temperature was over 90 degrees at the time of the shoot with obviously no snow. Guava replaced the background scene, adding mist, snow and distant mountains to create a realistic looking shot of a ski lift in mid-winter. Guava visual effects artist Amber Wilson created another shot where a tire swing hanging under a tree spins to magically reveal a Mercedes wheel rim inside. A number of live-action plates were shot on location—with and without the tire rim—and Wilson combined the takes to create the effect. As the camera moved through the shot, Wilson used Boujou to generate and combine 3-D camera information for each take. Additional Guava credits include visual effects artists Greg Cutler and Mark Wilhelm, CG artist Steve Berger, and visual effects producer Misha Stanford-Harris.
R!OT Santa Monica crafted a new look for the memorable last scene of Alien 3 for its inclusion in FOX Home Entertainment’s "Alien Quadrilogy," the nine-disc boxed set, which arrived in December. R!OT artists altered the timing and digitally enhanced the scene in which Ellen Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) sacrifices her life by jumping into a fiery pit rather than let scientists take a monstrous alien back to Earth. R!OT’s team of artists were tasked with altering the scene so that Ripley falls more slowly. R!OT also contributed to the sequence in Alien 3 where the alien creature makes its first appearance as an infant emerging from the womb of a dead ox. Artists replaced the background, depicting the ox’s open womb, with an alternate background in which details of the animal are clearer. Additionally, R!OT produced a star field effect for a scene in Alien Resurrection, the final film in the series. The star field appears outside the window of a spacecraft in a scene that was extended for "Alien Quadrilogy." The star field had to be made to match the analogous element in the original, shorter scene.
The 2004 season of the Travel Channel’s World Poker Tour (WPT) is rolling out with higher stakes, bigger pots and a new television and radio campaign created by Viewpoint Creative, Boston and Los Angeles. Viewpoint was challenged with making the statement that the WPT was the original poker programming show on television. To do this, the Viewpoint Creative team designed a TV campaign that shows the players walking down a runway as adoring fans clap and scream, followed by the table of players on top of a 42-story Los Angeles office building. The campaign includes commercials that aired on NBC, promos for cable, a number of spots for the Travel Channel’s own airing time, as well as a :30 radio spot. Viewpoint’s credits include creative directors Michael Middeleer and Joseph Kiely.
IN GEAR
Interface Media Group (IMG) has expanded its array of High Definition Television (HDTV) tools with the purchase of a Sony CineAlta HDW F900 camera and the Da Vinci 2K color enhancement system. The HDW F900 is capable of record/playback of 1080 progressive at 23.98, 24, 25, 29.97, or 30 frames per second or 1080 interlaced at 50, 59.94 or 60 fields per second. Shooting at 24p allows for frame-for-frame video-to-film transfer. The camera is outfitted with a series of lenses, filters, mattebox, follow focus and other essential accessories to complete the HD package. Washington, D.C.-based IMG provides graphics design, computer animation and special effects, digital compositing, editing, sound design/audio mixing, studio production, film-to-tape transfer and tape-to-tape color correction, duplication, world standards conversion, and the development of specialized software products.
STOCK SHOTS
Artbeats, a royalty-free stock footage company based in Myrtle Creek, Ore., provided video elements to Media Evolutions for Justin Timberlake’s "Justified 2003 World Concert Tour." The performance incorporated several clips from Artbeats’ standard definition collections, including "Water Effects 1," "Water Effects 2" and "Storm Clouds" to create a dramatic backdrop for several Timberlake’s songs, including "Cry Me a River" and "Take It From Here." Using Adobe After Effects and an Avid Media Composer, the Media Evolutions team composited additional video elements with Artbeats footage to achieve the desired effect for the singer’s concert tour.
