Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/51295
vfx FOR SPOTS cial — a :60 — for broadcast and cinema, as well as two :30 cut downs highlighting differ- ent facets of the Wrangler. A much-longer two-minute cut was also delivered for use on the Jeep Website. According to Derakhshani, the team's primary tool for animation was Autodesk Maya and the Vray renderer. Maya fluids were used for some of the effects work and were rendered using Mental Ray. Adobe's After Effects and Photoshop were used for much of the digital matte paintings. The Foundry's Nuke was used for compositing, and finishing was performed in Autodesk Inferno. The :60 edit contains 50 shots, and as many as 44 of them involved visual effects. A team of five Zoic artists began work on the spot's previs and asset development. At its highest point, as many as 15 artists were working on the commercial to meet the delivery deadline. Press attributes close collaboration with Chrysler repre- sentative Kim Adams House with helping things move so smoothly. J.J. Abrams-style, like Lost, where it's just the title card. It's an art that has gone away." Today, Big Machine regularly handles work on multiple commercials simultaneously. As owner/operators, Peterson and Carlson still have their creative hands in things, along with a staff of 10, and freelance support when they need it. Petersen's background is as an editor, allowing him to cut much of the work that comes through their doors. "It's a mix of both artistry and management," he says. "We're still pretty hands-on. That's really important to Ken and me. We have multiple jobs going on at the same time. Where there are jobs, where there is a huge pipeline, we trust a lot of the responsibility to the team." Big Machine recently completed work on a new spot for Ubisoft that made use of its range of services, including production, edito- rial and visual effects. The spot promotes the gaming company's Drawsome Table, which connects to Wii systems, allowing kids to draw, sketch and color, as well a play games on their TV. Petersen directed the project. latitude if we want to reframe a shot." Petersen adds that the depth of the "negative" allows artists to "easily pull keys and do tight rotos." Big Machine has a well- tested Red workflow in place. The studio has a Red Rocket card and Redcine-X, along with a 12-core Mac tower. "We are really solid with post workflow internally," says Petersen. "We do all the con- versions and transcoding ourselves too." In the case of the Ubisoft spot, the Red captured R3D files were first rendered out as Apple ProRes 422 files for the edit. Once the client approved the cut, footage was then transcoded for different purposes. The edit was performed using Final Cut Pro 7. Graph- ics were created using a combination of Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop, along with Maxon's Cinema 4D. Petersen attributes a tight animatic and detailed notes taken on set with making things move smoothly on visual effects jobs like this one. "We'll scout the physical space," he says of the shoot, recording exact angles, DRAWING THEM IN Burbank's Big Machine Design (www.big- Big Machine's Ken Carlson: the studio integrated VFX for this Ubisoft piece using Maxon Cinema 4D and tracking software. machine.net) opened in the spring of 2003, writing, producing and editing promos for broadcast clients, but with the goal of even- tually evolving into a commercial studio. "When we first started, a lot of our work was just motion graphics design," recalls company co-founder Ken Carlson. "But, as we evolved, we brought in the ability to shoot live action, and integrated the motion graphics and design with the live actions. As we did more live action, that necessitated picking up visual effects techniques and tools to complement what we were doing." "It's been a great evolution," add co- founder Steve Petersen. "We also did main titles for television shows and promo work. As everything has evolved, main title work has sort of changed and gone away. Nice lengthy animations have basically become the 30 Post • January 2012 "It was really critical for us to have an understanding of what we were going to do visual effects wise," Carlson recalls. "If we had gone out and hired a director who didn't have an understanding of it all, we would have had a really expensive mess on our hands." The commercial shows a family sitting on their living room couch. Their young daughter is creating art using the Drawsome Tablet. Her colorful work comes to life, surrounding the family in an animated imagery. The Big Machine team shot live action using a Red camera with the MX sensor. "That's kind of become our tool of choice for shooting this kind of stuff," Petersen explains. "It gives us the most flexibility in post because of the large size of the 'nega- tive.' All of our deliverables are 2K — 1920x1080 — but at 24 frames per second, the camera shoots 5K, so we've got so much www.postmagazine.com camera speed, lenses and distances. "It's really specific," he notes. That's our secret to mak- ing this work. Without it, it would be an abyss of trying to solve a big problem. It's been super helpful." Elements that are created for the animatic continue to evolve as production progresses, so there is no need to return to square one. Big Machine was able to integrate the visual effects with the live action using Cinema 4D and camera tools such as SynthEyes Camera Tracker or Boujou matchmoving software. Adobe After Effects was used to complete the composite. Apple's Color was used for color correction. "It has a really good R3D raw file integra- tion into it, so we are able to color off the R3Ds," Petersen notes. Shooting with the Red provides a lot of continued on page 46