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Captain ameriCa: the Winter Soldier L OS ANGELES — Visualization house Proof Inc. (www.proof-inc.com) provided extensive previs and postvis services for the recent Marvel Entertainment motion picture, Captain America: The Winter Soldier, starring Chris Evans, Scar- lett Johansson, Robert Redford, and Samuel L. Jackson, under the direction of Anthony Russo and Joe Russo. Under the guidance of Proof's creative director/founder Ron Frankel, the studio spent 14 months planning the previs for the film, and then another eight months during the postvis process. Marvel requested black and white previs, so the Proof team, headed by previs supervisor Monty Granito, employed its own proprietary realtime CGFX toon shader that had been developed in-house by Anna Lee, which allowed the team to focus efforts on blocking, composition and action. Proof also relied heavily on its own technical support structure, including camera rigs, a proprietary character builder and a few render tools, and then animated sequences, creating shots in Autodesk Maya and, on the back end, editing the sequences together in Adobe Premiere. The team also used 3d Connexion's Space Pilot to give Proof's cameras a genuine camera feel. postings living hope N ASHVILLE — Hummingbird Productions (www.hummingbirdproductions.com), producers of original music and sound design for the entertainment and advertising industries, were recently charged with creating a highly-moving score for the feature-length documentary, Living Hope. Directed by David Kiern and produced by Mitchell Galin for Epiphany Documentary Films, Living Hope is the story of three individuals who have devoted their lives to serving the poor in South Africa. Hummingbird's CEO/founder/CD Bob Farnsworth wrote the 90-minute score, which features synthetic instrumentation. However, the film is highly dialogue oriented and, as Farnsworth explains, there were countless times when musical punctuation was necessary. Farnsworth roughed out the scenes with basic synthetic sounds, and then came back and "emotionalized" them, bringing in Larry Hall to make the strings sound as authentic as possible, and Aaron Howard to connect with the organic nature of the work in his mix, serving as the score's engineer. The team brought in guitar (Kiernan McMullen and Robert Arthur) and vocals where appropri- ate to warm up the soundtrack and make an important, emotional connection with the audience. the laSt Ship S ANTA MONICA — The Last Ship, a Broadway-bound musical from Sting, is receiving an elegant launch via a new spot from design studio Blind (www.blind.com) and entertainment marketing agency SpotCo. The ad tells a story, inspired by the show's script, of fathers, sons and a red ship, through a series of impressionistic illustrations painted by Blind's team. SpotCo presented Blind with the show's logo, and asked the studio to apply its interpretation to the artwork. Blind CD Greg Gunn, art director Tuna Bora and designer Julia Wright developed a simple story based on the script. Through sketches and paintings, the team produced a series of illustrations representing key moments. Artists applied sweeping, textual brush strokes to paper and photographed them on a stage, with Photoshop, After Effects, Premiere and a good amount of custom-made Photoshop brushes. The studio used Reelsmart Motion Blur and Colorista II plug-ins, and a Red Epic to cap- ture ink and paint elements. CUBiCle C HICAGO — Lucky Charms cereal is not just for kids. At least that's the message behind a series of spots targeting adult consumers. The latest is Cubicle (:15), created by agency Saatchi & Saatchi, New York and featuring animation from studio Calabash Anima- tion (www.calabashanimation.com). Cubicle takes an office worker, seated at her desk with a bowl of Lucky Charms, through an explosion of color, cereal bits, falling charms, pixie dust and paper- work, to bring her to a lush, green forest, accompanied by brand mascot, Lucky the Leprechaun. Calabash, led by creative director Wayne Brejcha, used a blend of practical effect and CG animation, rely- ing on Autodesk Maya for Lucky and the rainbow explosion elements and the subsequent transition from the office to the forest. To complete the rainbow explosion sequence, the team composited the CG animated cereal bits with The Foundry's Nuke into live-action confetti that had been blown out of an air cannon on-set and photographed at a few hundred frames-per-second so it would appear in slow-motion when played back at 24fps. Lucky's animation was originally created as draw- ings on paper, scanned and used as a template to cre- ate the first draft of CG. Adobe Photoshop's animation module was used early on to make sketch-over tem- plates that helped guide the developing CG. www.postmagazine.com Post • May 2014 39