With today’s commercials having more visual effects and less time for prep, pre-visualization is key to the success of the spot. Pre-vis is simple—it is no different than prepping for a live-action shoot and should be as commonplace.
That said, there are still many people in our industry who know very little about visual effects or the difference between 2-D and 3-D. Pre-visualizing your spot will help guide you with a road map of how things will be done down the pipeline. This will not only help you stay sane, but also show your client how the commercial will move forward, which will keep them off your back.
Throughout the years I have been at several effects houses, and each approach to pre-vis is similar. For example, the agency creative team has an effects-driven commercial ready to move into production at the agency. Even before contacting a director, the agency producer should contact an effects house to go over the boards, scan them into the Avid, color them to give some life and create an animatic, which shows the direction of the effect(s) and story.
Let’s say the creative team asked for a car to fly over another car, and the client is nervous about this sequence due to safety issues. An effects company can create a low-resolution vehicle in 3-D and show the action within the animatic, which would hopefully show your client that it is safe to shoot the concept. Insurance issues instantly reduced! If you are a director creating a pre-vis, the animatic will have camera angles, calculations on distance, lens information and how a specific sequence could be shot. It will help reduce the fix-it-in-post woes, and make the visual effects team the director’s partner in a successful production.
Time is always a factor. Often we receive calls asking us if we can bid a job within a day and complete the job by the following week. The answer is usually: "Argh!" An agency producer once said to me, "The only problem I have with effects, which I love, is we receive our creative late, which leaves us no time to even think about effects." My response is always, "Let us come into the agency to do a seminar on pre-vis." This will, in turn, lead agency creatives to take pre-vis into consideration and come in with production and effects that work with the concept, budget and timeframe.
We recently worked on a project where over drinks (go figure), we hit on a buzzword, and three weeks later, our creative director was in the agency, working with them on a new idea and figuring out how to work out the smallest details using visual effects. In the end, the job was seamless, the client was briefed, and we were all excited about the campaign. It worked because they brought us in as a creative partner and wanted to know as much as possible about how we intended to get the job done.
Pre-visualization is about imagining the possibilities and then conceiving the steps to completion. Pre-visualize your next job and see how it changes your future productions (they’ll be much less stressful, though cocktails might still be in order). My suggestion is that if you haven’t been briefed on what pre-vis is about, then contact your favorite effects house and ask to be walked through the process, complete with visual examples. It will change the way you view effects, make your life much easier, and production will run more efficiently.
