Barclaycard’s “Rollercoaster”–a commercial in which a man commutes to work in amusement park ride style–and Coca-Cola’s “Finals,” in which a student is aroused from slumber by characters in his history textbooks, enabling him to get to his history final exam just in time, are SHOOT’s Visual Effects & Animation Chart toppers this quarter.
The former is also this week’s “Top Spot,” and as part of that coverage (see separate story), Ben Smith of The Mill, New York, who was shoot supervisor/CG supervisor on “Rollercoaster,” provides insights into the visual effects process that went into the project as well as the close working relationship The Mill enjoys with “Rollercoaster” director Nicolai Fuglsig of bicoastal/international MJZ.
Among the notable past collaborations between The Mill and Fuglsig was the lauded “It’s Mine” spot for Coca-Cola.
“Rollercoaster” came out of BBH London and is the much anticipated sequel to the Barclaycard commercial “Waterslide,” which helped Peter Thwaites of Gorgeous Enterprises, London, earn the Directors Guild of America (DGA) Award as best spot director of 2008.
Meanwhile Coke’s “Finals” opens on a college student fast asleep at his desk next to his textbooks. It’s 11:25 a.m. and we see from a self-reminder note that he has a final exam in history at 11:30.
So much for studying hard until the wee hours paying off at test time. It looks doubtful he will even be awake at test time.
But not to worry. Historical mini-figures come to life from the textbooks and make every effort to arouse him–initially to no avail as a volley of arrows and even cannon fire fail to get him up.
Finally Napoleon, Da Vinci and Cleopatra have a sure-fire idea. They notice a nearby Coke bottle sitting on the desk and devise a plan to use the familiar “psshht” sound of the bottle opening to awaken him.
Sure enough the popping open of the Real Thing does the trick and the student dashes off hopefully to ace his final exam.
Daniel Kleinman of London-based Rattling Stick and bicoastal Epoch Films directed “Finals” for Wieden+Kennedy, Portland. Moving Picture Company (MPC), London, was the visual effects house.
“Finals” While “Rollercoaster” and its visual effects challenges are covered in this edition’s “Top Spot,” SHOOT caught up with MPC visual effects supervisor Yourick Van Impe to gain backstory on Coke’s “Finals.”
“What was precious creatively to Daniel [director Kleinman] about this project was to be true to the small characters and their world,” related Van Impe. “Danny didn’t want a big world shrunk down. He instead very much wanted a real small world which these mini-characters inhabit–and then to bring them together with the big human world of the boy sleeping at his desk.”
Van Impe said camera measurements were critical to attain the proper depth of field so that when the two worlds–shot on different stages–came together, they did so realistically. And while green screen was deployed, Van Impe noted that he also went with “sympathetic colors” for certain key settings–like gray to more closely coincide to the page of a book which the characters stood on, or brown to correspond to the desk.
“This helped to make our lighting as natural as possible,” he said. “Yes, we could have used more green screen and then pulled the green out but when you do that you remove some of the other colors.”
While close-ups of prime historical characters such as Napoleon were live action, other scenes with depth of field and/or featuring other characters deployed Maya and Massive software to create computer-generated characters based on the live-action and on still shots of the performers.
For example, the CG route was taken for the scene in which a long line of soldiers appeared at the ready to try to wake up the student.
“It all comes down to our shooting two worlds that are of different scale yet making them mesh together so they look and register true as one,” affirmed Van Impe who used Nuke, Massive and Shake for the compositing.
