6 Post • December 2009 www.postmagazine.com
Bits & Pieces
The Weather Channel recently turned to Atlanta's Tube (www.tubecreative.com) to help
promote its first annual "Guaranteed White
Christmas Sweepstakes." The studio created a
sales video and promos designed to spread
awareness of the contest, in which the winner
will be visited by the Weather Channel crew and
a snow machine that will make their holiday
white. Producer Pat Piper provided a script,
stock images and a rough logo. Chris Downs
color corrected, Photoshoped and animated the images to create an album of snowy
Christmas memories. Using After Effects, Downs added snow to suburban houses.
Venice, CA's Digital Domain (www.digitaldomain.com) helped create a new TV
spot for Ubisoft's
Assasin's Creed II videogame. Eyes — conceived by agency
Cutwater, and produced by Anonymous Content — shows the faces of re-
cently killed medieval characters. The faces were shot live action, but were
treated by the studio to give them the believability of being dead. This in-
cluded re-lighting and extracted all signs of movement. Editorial house Final
Cut edited the spot, which features sound design by Elias Arts. One Union in
San Francisco handled the mix.
Mechanism creates
graphics for SyFy special
N
EW YORK — Mechanism
Digital (www.mechanis-
mdigital.com), here, has
created a graphics pack-
age for 2012: Startling
New Secrets, a SyFy spe-
cial that looks at buzz and
rumors surrounding the
end of the Mayan calen-
dar. The show was pro-
duced by Rebecca Ratliff,
of Peacock Productions,
and looks for answers
and truths as the world
enters a new era.
Mechanism was faced
with creating a show
open in just four days.
Since there was not
enough time to model
each of the structures
featured in the se-
quence, the team used a
2.5 dimension tech-
nique, calling on Adobe Photoshop
for textures and attaching them to
simple 3D planes in Autodesk Maya.
The open sweeps viewers past
structures representing the ancient
world, including the Mayan temples,
and the Egyptian Sphinx and Pyra-
mids. Saturated reds, blues and golds
were chosen for the color palette.
The show's titles for the open and
lower thirds are true 3D models. Fin-
ishing touches, including compositing,
lighting effects and color correction,
were handled in Eyeon Fusion.
Mechanism credits include art di-
rector Mark Palkoski and producer
Ted Keenan.
Eyeon Fusion was used for compositing and more.
