Canon’s “Journey,” a spot which artfully puts an array of pictures into motion, and Liberty Mutual’s Lighthouse, a web short that shows a community coming together to generate illumination that a disabled lighthouse can’t provide, are SHOOT’s Visual Effects & Animation Chart toppers for the summer quarter.
Click Here To Read Visual Effects & Animation: Summer 2008 Top 10 Visual Effects & Animation Chart
The former pieces together the arc of a football play through a range of scenarios, starting with the hike in a backyard game all the way to a touchdown in a filled-to-capacity stadium. As the journey from amateur to pro football progresses in a series of moving still pictures, so too does the quality of the photos themselves improve, depicting the growth of a photographer once he or she gets a Canon EOS Rebel XSi camera and begins to look at the world with a more discerning eye. The effects house on Canon’s “Journey” was Asylum, Santa Monica.
Meanwhile Liberty Mutual’s Lighthouse, a CG character animation web short on the insurance company’s Responsibility Project website takes us to a world of a lighthouse keeper who has an accident, dropping the large light apparatus he’s carrying which shatters into assorted pieces. An approaching ship thus is put in peril until the townspeople come to the rescue, each holding a lantern to illuminate the area and provide safe passage for the vessel.
This CG animation short was a joint effort of Exopolis, Los Angeles, and ProMotion Studios, Sydney.
“Journey” Directed by Andrew Douglas of bicoastal Anonymous Content for Grey New York, the Chart’s number one entry, “Journey,” had Asylum involved early on, even before the project was formally awarded to Douglas. Determined to tell the story through the use of still images, Douglas brought Asylum into the project’s fold as a consultant to find the most effective technique. During this phase, Asylum came across a Microsoft technology demo of Photosynth, software that allows the creation of virtual environments out of a photo library. While Photosynth is in test mode, it provided inspiration as Asylum VFX supervisor Paul O’Shea worked with his team to put together a pre-visualization test of moving stills. This pre-vis gave Douglas something tangible to show both agency and client, helping to sell them on Douglas’ vision for the project.
When the job began, Douglas and Asylum stayed true to that vision but, said O’Shea, simplified it. “We moved away from a technical 3D way of working with cameras and just got involved creatively with Andrew as he captured assorted photographs from a variety of angles and depths,” related O’Shea. At each location, Douglas would stage the scene working in tandem with Asylum, line up a pack of 10 photographers that included himself, DP Flor Collins and crew members, then have them shoot the action simultaneously as it played out.
“We had to be sure we could get a decent enough rate of stills, to have enough photographs being stored in memory, capturing and moving around the action at the appropriate moment,” noted O’Shea. “We found that the process was forgiving, that technical restrictions often faded away. For example we did not have to synch cameras to shoot at the same rate. The guys taking photos got into a nice rhythm. Then there was the task of organizing the data and being able to show the client, setting pictures against each other to build nice graphic shapes and a progression of the action. We worked on the composition of photos, cropping at times to get the part of the action you wanted, then connecting one image to the next, building scenes.”
All the while, stressed O’Shea, everyone had to be conscious of preserving the aesthetic of the still photograph. Some other effects wrinkles figured in the mix. For example, Asylum used Massive software to fill the stadium with people. The studio also deployed stadium settings from other jobs to help build the architecture of the final stadium venue in “Journey.”
Yeoman duty was done by editor Michael Elliot of Mad River Post, New York. Elliot painstakingly culled through some 70,000 images, narrowing them down to somewhere between 160 to 170 to build the seven scenes depicted in the spot. “Instead of twenty to thirty edits to make the commercial, I was cutting the spot on a frame-by-frame basis,” said Elliot who tried to stretch the action in each scene across the frame “so that when it went to Asylum, they could mirror that movement–not by zooming or panning on the shots but by stacking them up in a scheme that would cause the movement to unfold across the screen.”
O’Shea said that Elliot would send an EDL over, then Inferno artist Miles Essmiller wrote script to conform the images and make them into Flame-acceptable formats.
Once the images were loaded into Flame, O’Shea and his Asylum ensemble would lay out the sequences. There was much back and forth between Asylum and Elliot to get each scene just right. The tinkering, which also involved both Douglas and Grey, extended well into the second week of the job when normally everything would have been set. But given the experimental nature of the project, it was necessary for everyone to be flexible.
Lighthouse Directed by Charlie Short and Ming Hsiung of Exopolis for Hill Holliday, Boston, Lighthouse entailed considerable collaboration between the two Los Angeles-based helmers and Sydney’s ProMotion Studios.
“Since it was a remote job–Exopolis in L.A. and us in Sydney–we developed a good rapport for working across instant messenger and we tested our homegrown video collaboration tool on them called Syncarella.com which made the feedback process a lot clearer,” related ProMotion co-founder James Neale who was a producer for the studio on the job. “It allowed us to either chat or IM, while watching and drawing on the video in a player which is synchronised with their player across the web. So aside from my occasional early morning start, it was like having the client across town.
“In the early stages of the project, we worked with [Exopolis producer] Mike [McCarthy] and Ming quite closely,” continued Neale. “They came to Australia for two weeks to meet and greet the team and to lock down a lot of the 3D design that was needed. Both are great guys, so we had a great few weeks hanging out and getting to know them. Ming gave us any art we needed and by the time they left, we’d nailed down the look of the main character and all the major sets with their lighting arrays. Having this done so clearly and early was invaluable to us in production, as it gave the whole team a feel on how it could look if we really wanted it to. And it gave the team some momentum.”
ProMotion then got immersed in the 3D production, hiring a few extra people to help out in animation and texturing. “We finalized animation–with the directors’ feedback–after about six weeks, during which time, the lighting, shading and effects work had also begun,” related Neale. “The Exopolis team then came down to Sydney again for the final three weeks, where Charlie [Short] guided us through the final stages of tweaks and edits, Ming made some polishing work on the piece in terms of composition, lighting and art direction, and we finalized all the special effects and rendered the project at HD resolution.”
Co-director Short, who also wrote Lighthouse, related that Exopolis sold the project to Liberty Mutual and Hill Holliday based on a treatment and some initial illustrations depicting the seaside village, the lighthouse itself and ocean waves. Exopolis in turn gravitated to ProMotion based on a referral from another Aussie studio.
“The water they [ProMotion Studios] did in CG was amazing and as you know that’s one of the most challenging things to do well in CG,” said Short. “We were drawn to their water and the depth and breadth of their overall body of CG work. ProMotion is a small shop and we found we could collaborate well with them. They added a lot of fine touches throughout the entire project.”
Short cited as an example the lighthouse glass lens door which the keeper opens in order to find out why the light is malfunctioning.
“The refraction work they [ProMotion] did on the glass, making it look quite old and thick added a lot to the scene,” said Short, noting that the sight of the time-worn, heavy glass set the stage for it shattering when the lighthouse keeper tried to lift it out of its cumbersome housing.
ProMotion’s Neale observed that the character animation posed the short’s biggest challenge as the lighthouse keeper had to express a wide range of emotion.
Helping to make his character watchable and engaging, said Neale, was creatively gratifying.
Short noted that at first he and his colleagues envisioned a tall, hulking guy as the lighthouse keeper. “But ultimately we felt that would be too imposing. We wanted to make him more accessible for viewers, a bit more of a caricature. The landscapes and environments in the piece–and a character that people could easily relate to–were definitely major elements in helping to make this project work.” Click here to view Lighthouse web short.
