Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/47583
DI ITTSBURGH — Animal (http://animalspots.com), with locations in Pittsburgh and Venice,CA, posted a series of television spots and viral films for K-Swiss promoting its Tubes training footwear.The "Kenny Powers, MFCEO" campaign centers around K-Swiss's new top executive, who now The studio used Scratch to color the footage, which came from a variety of camera formats. owns 51 percent of the company. Power likes to vocalize his thoughts, as vulgar as they might be, and believes no promotion is too outrageous when it comes to touting their product line. Animal used its Assimilate Scratch system to post 14 spots for the cam- paign, which was conceived by creative director Matt Murphy and principal Glenn Cole of 72andSunny in Los Angeles.The five-minute Web film fea- tures comic/actor Danny McBride, who reprises his role of Kenny Powers from the HBO series Eastbound And Down. Cameos are made by NFL pros Matt Cassel and Patrick Willis, martial arts champions Jon "Bones" Jones and Urijah Faber, personal trainer Jillian Michaels, wrestling legend Rey Misterio and Olympic-hopeful marathon runner Josh Cox, all of whom join his staff. Director Michael Bay also makes an appearance, as Powers tries to recruit him to make a new movie that turns him into a Transformer. Kenny Powers, K-Swiss MFCEO was shot in LA using a combination of Arri Alexa, Red MX and Canon 5D cameras. Stock footage was also added to the mix. Along with the viral Web film, Animal conformed and graded six 18 Post • September 2011 www.postmagazine.com Gallery Animal completes K-Swiss campaign additional shorts in Scratch, each with multiple versions.The company also created the CG Powers Transformer and several flame effects for Foot- locker versions. "With the viral alone having a running time of five minutes, there was a lot of coloring to do on this project," says colorist Allan Stallard."With ma- terial originated in a variety of formats and color spaces (Alexa Log C, Red RAW, ProRes and H.264 stock footage), plus the client-end of the post cycle happening in LA, we had to establish an efficient way of working.We could have had colorists working round the clock in LA, but the advanced capabilities of Scratch allowed us to share the workload between our stu- dios in Pittsburgh and Venice." Stallard says he could color during the day on Scratch in Pittsburgh, and then e-mail the relevant CONstructs and EDL to LA where Matt Lear would continue coloring the project. "Then Matt would e-mail back his CONstruct of the latest work-in- progress, so it was ready for me when I came in the following day," explains Stallard. "The beauty of working this way is there's no FedEx-ing of tapes or drives. Just done. Boom.Now that we have Scratch Six, I'm re- ally excited to check out the possibilities for the new remote log-in features with this type of workflow." In terms of grading, the initial task was to balance the Alexa, Red, 5D and stock footage. Stallard tends to grade with the original RAW files on the same timeline, outputting finals to DPX. "We initially played around with the Alexa LUT Generator for Scratch, but we got satisfactory results from just primary grading the RAW footage, and then copying the grading settings from clip to clip. Most of the Red footage was high-speed material or pick-up shots. Since Scratch supports RedColor2, RedGamma2 and Red Meta Data (RMD),we could change the whole balance and the ISO of the footage, and easily eye-match it to the Alexa material.The 5D footage doesn't have any metadata, so we just did a careful eye-matching job on that using Scratch's lift, gamma and gain color wheels, in combination with curves, which let you re-map the luminance or individual RGB color curves of a shot." Stallard says that every shot had at least one Scaffold to apply, be it a soft-edged vignette or to isolate an area of an image. Some shots, such as the performers' faces, required more intensive work. Scratch was also used to grade and pre-composite a small number of blue- and greenscreen VFX shots, such as the scene featuring Powers as a robot. P