Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/202179
Michael Pardee was the VFX executive producer and Diana Cheng VFX producer. Kyle Valenta edited Vapor Trail at Joint. IBM's Watson It's remarkable what IBM's Watson computer can accomplish in 15 seconds and equally remarkable that New York-based Imaginary Forces (www.imaginaryforces. com) was able to communicate the abilities of the world's smartest computer in eight :15 spots from Ogilvy/NY using a purely graphical design solution. With the theme of "Let's build a smarter planet," the animated commercials use strong but simple graphics and a color palette of blue, green, yellow and white against black to show that Watson can quickly analyze clinical data, learn from product manuals and crossreference cancer symptoms. The spots were created specifically to air during the US Open; Web versions reside with Watson marketing online and the campaign will also be showcased at the IBM headquarters and event spaces. "IBM wanted to explain what Watson is — the only thing that people know about the computer is that it won Jeopardy; they don't know what the technology is used for," says Imaginary Forces' Ronnie Koff, who codirected the campaign with Dan Gregoras. "The design had to communicate to viewers age eight to 80 how Watson is improving health care and affecting the financial world, consumer engagement, customer support and research." The brief for Imaginary Forces was to showcase Watson's skills in "a simple, approachable, almost light-hearted way," he notes. "We had to take the edge off traditional flow charts and bar charts, and be fun and light spirited, cinematic and lively. Watson already had a color palette and graphic identity — IBM sort of invented simple brand iconography — but it was flat. So we dimensionalized it." The eight spots had to "feel like a family," with a consistent graphic approach, yet each was endowed "with its own personality. Each commercial has a different sensibility, but they all relate in visual style," explains Koff. Imaginary Forces enjoyed collaborating with Ogilvy, tossing ideas around in brainstorming sessions and even using Play-Doh modeling compound as "a vehicle for making Watson feel fun." Play-Doh's plasticity showed up in a health care spot, where molecular connections "look like little balls of dough," with a very handmade aesthetic, says Koff. Although turnaround time was short, once the spots' concepts were finalized, a storyboard artist drew up boards, which were cut into animatics. Then a previs team got to work and elements were modeled and rigged. Maxon Cinema 4D was "perfect for [animating] this type of design," he notes. "It has all the tools for creating the look in a very efficient way. Some of the animations were very specific to the software's MoGraph module." Lighting and texturing was done in Maya. The secret to telling Watson's story in :15 bites was "to design for :15," Koff says. "We had to focus on simplicity, be very deliberate and distill the task down to something that was easy to understand yet dynamic at the same time. So time was a consideration, along with the design." IBM is delighted with the new Watson campaign, according to Koff. "They love the animation, the humanity and warmth that we brought to something that could be seen as cold. They knew we could give Watson personality." At Imaginary Forces, Jon Hassell produced the campaign, Jeremy Cox was the 2D lead, Jesse Holmes the CG lighter and Zach Kilroy the editor. old spIce sIllIness Wieden+Kennedy/Portland, OR, continues its wildly successful "Freshness" campaign for Old Spice with four more :15 spots packed with "old school silliness," says John Leonti, creative director and head of 3D at The Mill LA (www.themill.com). Celebrating the start of the NFL season, the commercials are football-themed, and two VFX-intensive spots showcase Denver Broncos player Wes Welker. Steve Rogers directed for Biscuit Filmworks. In Snow Globe, Welker is sitting alone in the locker room, feeling cool and clean, surrounded by freshness and "in the position to win" as he takes a sniff of his Old Spice deodorant stick. Suddenly, it starts to snow and the camera pulls back to show that Welker's trapped in a snow globe, titled Football Man, on a dollar store shelf. The shoot captured plates of Welker in a partially-built snow globe set and a dollar store interior with an empty space on its shelf. "We used practical snow on-set," says Leonti, "but the performances the agency liked were shot without snow, so we added CG snow created with Houdini, dialing the volume up and down so we didn't obscure Wes. With the CG snow we were also able to get the scale of how particles move in a snow globe — we had more flexibility to get things the way everyone wanted them." HDRIs aided in lighting the CG snow globe properly for the dollar store set; the globe's glass dome looks a bit shopworn with scuffmarks and imperfections as it reflects the retail environment. Lizards finds a dejected Welker in the locker room with his teammates on a game day when "the going gets tough." He sniffs his Old Spice deodorant stick and lets the freshness take him "to a fresher place" — the sands of a tropical isle where, unfortunately, huge lizards are eating his legs. The Mill's animators based their CG lizards for the spot on the look of a monitor lizard, manipulating the size until they got the scale just right.They also went back and forth with creatives on the texture of the lizards' skin and stripes. "We've done quite a lot of creatures, so we were well versed" in how to craft them, Leonti reports. "We put the base textures down in layers so if they wanted more stripes we could turn that up in the comp." Animators had to account for trails and depressions in the sand as the lizards swished their big tails. But following the Old Spice humor mandate, they steered clear of "the icky and yucky" and didn't show lizard teeth, saliva or bites. Animators used Maya for modeling and rigging, Autodesk's Mudbox for textures and Solid Angle's Arnold for rendering. Flame and The Foundry's Nuke handled compositing chores. "The spots were most challenging in terms of turnaround time," says Leonti. "We did four in four weeks, so we had to build in the flexibility to make changes easily as we got closer to deadline." Christina Thompson produced for The Mill, Tim Davies was VFX supervisor and lead Flame artist, Lu Meng-Yang was 3D lead and Ben Smith the lead 2D artist. www.postmagazine.com Bent Image Lab helped transform landscapes for this Yurbuds spot promoting its earphones. Post • October 2013 23