By A SHOOT Staff Report

With crossing over between long-form and short-form fare a way of professional life for visual effects/animation studios, the dynamic of how one informs the other has taken firm hold.
    Feature visual effects experience can have a significant influence on a studio’s spotmaking endeavors, for example, on creative, technical, R&D, logistical and artistic fronts.
    To get a better handle on those influences, SHOOT canvassed visual effects/animation studio executives and artisans for their observations on the long and short of give and take in a crossover world. We posed the following multi-pronged question:

    What theatrical feature film or television project that your studio worked on during the past year has influenced and/or informed your work in commercials or other forms of advertiser-related content? How so? (Please explain how it influenced or informed your work in the ad sector creatively, artistically and/or from a philosophical or logistical standpoint).

    Here’s a sampling of the feedback we received:

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John Andrews,
executive producer/creative director, Kachew!, Hollywood
sr VP/head of production,
Klasky Csupo, Hollywood

Here at Klasky Csupo we’ve been developing a feature project that involves a combination of CGI environments with 2D character work where all the elements have to blend well and live together as they are juxtaposed within the overall art direction. Working on the feature, we develop our little tricks of the trade with regard to camera tracking, shading, lighting, compositing and virtually all other areas of animation production. This year these fed directly into ka-chew!’s combination spot work for Chef Boyardee and CareerBuilder.com. In addition a number of our ka-chew! directors are filmmakers outside of their commercial work. Director David Russo, for instance, has recently finished his first feature and is submitting it to Sundance. Already some of the unique practical FX David developed for the movie are being shown to our potential clients. Effects David used in his spots this year for Samsung Glyde and Instinct (Leo Burnett, Chicago) were derived from work he had done on previous independent film projects. Likewise directors Paul Cummings and Tony Fiandaca are directly incorporating the stop motion techniques from their YouTube hit Tony vs Paul into campaigns for Gogurt and RedVines. Looking to the future, we expect to see the visual FX, design, animation and art direction that owner Gabor Csupo brought to his two recent feature projects, Bridge to Terabithea and the Secret of Moonacre, filter into our spot work as we shortly begin to market Gabor as a ka-chew! commercial helmer.

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Mat Beck,
senior VFX supervisor and owner,
Entity FX, Santa Monica, and Vancouver, B.C.

Entity FX takes pride in being “multi-cultural,”–in working on big screen and small screen projects at the same time and benefiting from the synergy between them. We produce a high quantity of high-quality shots for projects with different timetables, budgets and directing styles, and a new solution in one arena often helps in solving challenges in the next.
    A recent example is our work creating synthetic environments. We put green screen actors into photo-real urban environments for The X Files: I Want to Believe and into more stylized backgrounds for Frank Miller’s The Spirit. Our general technique involves turning a concept sketch into a detailed painting and bringing it to life by adding geometry and detailed texturing.  It has also been used in TV projects such as Smallville and Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles.
    To create a Nissan ad that we are renewing for the 2008 holiday season, we leveraged the same approach.  In “Auto Mall,” real people populate a totally CG shopping mall full of cars.  An approved concept sketch is turned into 3D geometry with camera moves that then drive the green screen shoot.  The environment is finalized by incorporating hi-res textures, details, and the actors from the live plates.
    Beyond specific cross-leveraging, spots represent a good synthesis for our pipeline because they require both very high quality and quick turnaround.  A confluence of multiple projects earlier this year had us producing 550 feature film shots and 150 high-resolution television shots within six weeks, which provided excellent practice for even the most demanding commercial job.

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Scott Boyajan,
executive producer, Commercial VFX,
Luma Pictures, Venice, Calif.

It’s no secret it is still a difficult feat to create believable CG water. When Luma Pictures took on the water sequences for City of Ember, it was necessary to step back and look at methods for creating water that had worked for us in the past, software that was on the market, plug-ins, multi-pass rendering techniques, etc., whilst also considering how to accomplish the 60-plus shots within the budget and the schedule for the show.  It would be imperative to come up with a methodology that would provide us with absolute photo-real water in a manner that was manageable and flexible. Working with “off-the-shelf” software combined with our in-house programming capabilities, we came up with a way of moving a large number of highly complex water shots through our studio in a timely fashion. Likewise, CG water in commercial spot work is still a common hurdle for production companies and directors.  With commercial timelines and budgets getting tighter all the time, working on films like City of Ember and other water intensive films allows Luma to invest in research & development to create complex effects that advertisers then benefit from.  We found this scenario to hold true on No Country for Old Men where our extensive research into animal physiology, fur development, character rigging and animation placed our studio in the unique position to handle similar scenarios more efficiently when dealing with commercial spots.  Ultimately, both disciplines reap the artistic benefits from the other and improve the end result.

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Ben Grossmann,
VFX supervisor/creative director, The Syndicate, Santa Monica

On Scorsese’s Rolling Stones film Shine a Light, we switched from using Film Scans to using HDCamSR tape in 4:4:4 to deliver our work, and to ensure the most color fidelity possible, we created all of our visual effects work in linear-light floating-point color, which more accurately models the way light behaves in the real world. This approach combined a no-compromise color workflow, with a output medium that offers a lot of ease-of-use with minimal trade-offs. Because we refined that pipeline for feature-film quality color, it was easy for us to switch to doing all of our commercial work the same way. So we’re no longer working with our material in the traditional video world with limited color range. We’re working on all of our ad projects with the same color workflow that we use on our feature work because the pipeline has become so seamless. This is giving us a much higher color fidelity, much more flexibility with last minute color changes and most importantly, a more invisible integration of the VFX work, with the production footage faster and easier.

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Lourri Hammack,
president/executive producer,
LAIKA/house, Portland, Ore.

LAIKA’s Entertainment division is currently wrapping animation on the Henry Selick-directed feature Coraline, which releases February 6, 2009. The film employs an array of technical approaches for stop motion, including shooting in stereoscopic, and new advances in armaturing and model building to achieve flawless consistency of performance. The crews in the Commercial/Content division, LAIKA/house, are currently integrating these technologies into commercial and original content projects to expand our creative capabilities. The biggest difference in working methodologies between Entertainment and House is scheduling. We simply could not have made the same advances in technology on short form projects, though we have been able to trim our production schedules by a third over the last few years. We have greatly benefited from three years of intensive R&D and the results will soon be coming to broadcast and content platforms.

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Winston Helgason, president,
The Embassy Visual Effects, Inc.,
Vancouver, B.C.

This is a very interesting question since we were chosen to too be one of the principal vendors on Ironman because of our commercial work.  The Citroen transforming car commercials along with our other robotic and mechanical based visual effects ads were instrumental for us to step into the feature film arena.  That being said, our work on Ironman and the short film Terminus has really improved our profile in the ad world over the past year. It’s hard to ignore the amount of buzz that a film like Ironman generates and Terminus has been in, and won, numerous international film festivals. Agency creatives definitely take notice of things like this and its really helped us generate business through an atypically slow period in advertising. Working on a long form projects can also be beneficial to the logistics of running a visual effects company. Since the post process on a film is typically around a year it really helps budgeting to have a steady revenue stream, which enables you to be a little more selective with the projects you take on. In order to work on Ironman we had to completely upgrade our infrastructure and expand our staff, which came in very handy this past summer when we were working on multiple large commercial projects at the same time. The pipeline, workflow, and render upgrades that we made for our feature work, has really streamlined our development process, and has been very beneficial for us as a commercial VFX house.

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Ian Hunter,
creative director/co-founder,
New Deal Studios, Inc., Los Angeles

New Deal Studios specializes in miniature, practical and digital effects. Our work on films like Iron Man, and The Dark Knight, has caused commercial production companies to approach us for “feature quality” work.  However, feature films historically have longer delivery schedules and deliberate design phases, while commercials come at you fast and furious.  The challenge becomes how to achieve a “feature” look on a commercial schedule.
    Recently the paradigm has changed, as feature films become like long-form commercials.  The release date gets established first, like a commercial’s airdate. Only then the “how-the-heck-are-we-going-to-do-this ” phase starts.  Creatives weigh in, change their minds, ask for tests; all before OK’ing any visual effects work.  Many creative decisions are postponed until after a rough-cut assembly, biting into the shortened post schedule. And yet that release date remains.
    Subsequently, we have had to expand and strengthen our design department. Using 3d design tools, we can quickly develop and modify a set or an effect before committing resources to its execution.  Having a digital design art department allows us to distribute digital assets to our other departments the moment the client gives the go-ahead.  Thus we build miniatures and sets while developing previsualizations, and production plans.  And once the build is complete, photography commences immediately with digital effects developed in tandem.
    Since we’ve established a process for features that can quickly combine practical and digital effects, we found that we can apply that method to commercials. This allows us to provide that “feature quality” look and feel to the commercial market, where delivery dates approach even faster and more furious than they ever have before.

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Jim Rider,
senior compositing supervisor on Ghost Town,
rhinofx, Stamford, CT, and New York

What we learned during our recent work on Dreamworks’ Ghost Town  will definitely help us in our future commercial projects. For that project, with it’s 60-plus effects shots, we needed a streamlined pipeline to get shots through from conception to completion. Features have a very tight schedule, tighter then spots,  so from the beginning we needed to communicate our creative ideas and the final look to David Koepp, the director. He had to grasp what we wanted to accomplish before we shot so we could finalize our production methodology going in. We realized the best way to do this was by using 3D previsualization. We pre-viz 90 percent of our spots, but on Ghost Town it had to be more detailed and specific.
    We created entire edited scenes in low rez 3D so David could get a sense of continuity and context, timing of the effects within the scenes because its a comedy. By doing this, we were able to do some creative back and forth and nail down a look and methodology before shooting even began. These previz shots were our guide both when shooting and when we were executing the final shots. Unlike in the commercial world where there is immediate feedback from the clients in the room, on a feature the feedback loop is slower so having decisions made ahead of time really helps the process.
    Most of the shots required many artists in different departments. We had all hands on deck in both 2D and 3D. Shots required 3-D tracking, modeling, lighting and animation and then these 3D elements would be fed to our Flame department for final compositing. Of course there would be revisions to shots, often months after we began them, so we had to have a very buttoned up tracking system to manage the resources and workflow. The departments involved in a particular shot would then need to turn over revised elements quickly. In the end we were really able to develop an efficient pipeline that gave us a certain rhythm on the show. We were able to interact creatively with the director, while he was interacting with the studio heads, as we invisibly coordinated all our resources behind the scenes, to generate shot revisions quickly and efficiently. I’m confident that we will be able to bring that expertise and efficiency to our commercial clients as well.

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Jerry Steele,
creative director/senior FX supervisor,
STEELE studios, Culver City, Calif.

Earlier this year STEELE studios completed work on Two:Thirteen, the latest psychological thriller from the makers of the Saw movie series. The entire process of  data management and distribution at our facility came under the gun. The visual effects requirements were substantial for a movie that was not slated as a visual effects piece, so many shots had to be distributed amongst many artists. Shots were moved between systems without the need for wranglers, operators or assistants, and all approvals were conducted over the Internet using QuickTime.
    In short the whole project was completed in cyberspace with no tape media involved.
    STEELE studios is no stranger to digital workflows, having embraced the groundbreaking technologies of Quantel’s generation Q hardware over the last five years and having been early adopters of the present DI color correction pipeline ideologies. The way in which we have used data management to expedite the recent film projects at STEELE studios is now becoming more prevalent in our commercial endeavors. More and more projects are arriving as data and the use of tape media is on the decline. STEELE studios is presently engaged in negotiations to acquire even more data management tools through Quantel, adding more systems and more distributable storage.
    Recent reports suggest that more and more producers are choosing to complete their productions using digital cameras that record to external solid state devices. This new means of capture presents large storage demands on facilities wishing to work on these projects and STEELE studios has positioned itself to accommodate all clients wishing to do so in commercial finishing.

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