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www.postmagazine.com 29 POST VFX FOR SPOTS JANUARY 2017 any studios today are charged with creating outstanding VFX for TV spots to help catch viewers' attention. With a healthy mix of creativity and the right tools, creatives are able to wow audi- ences, and help drive the brand's messaging. Here, post pros weigh in on the topic. THE COLONY — LIPTON The Colony (the-colony.com), located on Broadway in New York City, recently completed work on two VR 360 spots for Lipton promoting its Enticing Chai and Magnificent Matcha teas. In each spot, a woman is enjoying a brief escape while drinking her Lipton tea. The spots invite con- sumers to "Find Your Focus." In one spot, a woman sits in her kitchen enjoy- ing the tea. The viewer is immersed in the tea cup where tea leaves swirl like schools of fish. In the distance, imagery of cherry blossom trees, Asian temples and yoga poses suggest a relaxed state of mind. The viewer ultimately transitions from inside the tea cup, back to the kitchen setting, where the woman appears relaxed after her escape. A second spot follows a similar approach, with imagery of Middle Eastern temples and smooth sailing river boats suggesting tranquility. Again, the viewer moves from within the tea cup back to the kitchen environment. According to David Gaddie, the creator of the online pieces and the owner of The Colony, the project came to the studio via Carrot, a Vice- owned agency. "It was pretty tight," he says of the delivery requirements. "I think it was two months total from award to completion of both. I think we had six weeks for first one and an extra two weeks to complete the second one, but we were working on them in parallel." Operating as a production company, The Colony also tapped its visual effects, animation and post production subsidiary Afterparty VFX to complete the project. The Colony already had experience working on virtual reality projects, having created a comedic 360 spot for Holiday Inn Express that presented a hot shower experience virtually. For the Lipton project, they were presented with a script that indicated that the viewer would be in the tea cup and see four scenes from within the cup. "It described the scenes to an extent," Gaddie recalls. "I would say 50 percent of what we see was represented in the agency script. But what wasn't represented was how we were going to transi- tion from scene to scene, and what we would see within the scenes specifically. We had to figure out the execution and the transitions, which became the biggest challenge. How to transition from one scene to the next and make a still scene very beau- tiful and fluid in those transitions." The production team decided to shoot the live action with a Red Dragon camera rather than a dedicated 360 camera. "We fitted the camera with a 180-degree fish eye stills lens, which gave us a circular 180 view of our scene," he explains. "With the one camera, we could see half of the 360 universe. It allowed us to keep the other half of the scene clear to be able to light [it]. One thing that is frustrating about 360 videos is that because you see everything, there's no place to put lights and equipment, which is why a lot of 360 videos look like no one has done any work lighting them." Footage was captured with the 180-degree lens in 6.5K. "Even though you are making things for 360, you generally make most things work within the 180-degree field anyway," says Gaddie. "People get irritated turning around in circles. It made sense to stage the action within the 180- degree field." The team then turned the turned the camera around and shot some plates to complete the 360 view. This allowed them to light the scene for the main camera angle and then remove the lights and completed the 360 view without any gear appear- ing in the scene. "We stitched it in Cara, the 360 VR plug-in for Nuke, which is a very good tool," says Gaddie. "That's become a really solid tool for 360 compositing. The Colony's core team of seven artists was joined by a handful of regular contributors to the studio, bringing the team to around a dozen. This included outside modelers, lighting experts and compositors. The 3D cup and tea leaves were modeled in Autodesk Maya. Realflow was used to create the swirling motion of the tea and the leaves with- in the cup. The studio used V-Ray to render the project, which will appear as pre-roll on YouTube. Visitors to the site who search for 360-degree VR content will see the Lipton spots in front of the searched content. The Colony also has a breakdown video of the Lipton spots, which can be found at vpostmagazine.com. — By Marc Loftus M The Colony relied on V-Ray, Maya and Realflow for Lipton. The Colony studio.