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Broadcast Design Nailgun designs ‘Dream Home’ for HGTV NEW YORK — Six-year-old design studio Nailgun, led by creative director Michael Waldron and VP/director of production Erik van der Wilden, understands exactly what cable network HGTV wants for its brand.That’s because over the years the company has been involved in promoting some of the network’s most popular shows, including Dear Genevieve, Design Star, Rate My Space, and the event show Dream Home, in which HGTV gives away a brand new home to one lucky viewer. day nights. Meteorologist Jen Carfagno and NBC contributor/pop culture columnist Touré introduce the film of the week and dis- cuss how weather plays a role in the story. The Weather Channel had an estab- lished graphic package, which included a color palette and a show logo;Tube Cre- ative took it from there. “They wanted a highly energized motion typography piece,” describes Downs.“We created :30 and :15 standalone promos, as well as a :20/:10 used for show topicals.” The piece opens with a calendar that fea- tures the Weather Channel logo landing on Friday. Big type flies in and out with weather- related icons such as clouds with falling rain and a tornado spiral. It is quick paced and in- tentionally shaky.The big 3D type was cre- ated in Cinema 4D. “The whole thing has a handheld camera “We really feel like we understand the HGTV brand very well,” says Waldron.“Our goal is always to give each show its own distinct look and create a brand within the brand.There are a lot of home improvement networks and shows out there so it is essential that HGTV stand out.” As they have for the past three years, HGTV challenged Nail- gun (www.nailgun.tv) to create a show open/show package for Dream Home without the benefit of any source material.This year the Dream Home is located in New Mexico, so Nailgun took its visual cues from the Southwest life, specifically the popular ballooning festival that takes place there each summer. “This is our third year working on Dream Home and it is al- ways fun for us to try and top what we did the year before and find a new way to present it,” Waldron says.“For this,we ani- mated balloons in 3D, and flat shaded them to show dimension- ality. In the past we used a flying camera effect, but this time we went a with more editorial approach.The whole look was in- spired by paintings of the sunrise on the Southwest landscape and how that could be interpreted into a graphics world.” while incorporating them into our process,” he says, pointing to the importance of more frequent feedback.“We pinpoint approval stages throughout the project more than we have in the past so we don’t run into the,‘No, I don’t like it’ response once we’ve already done a considerable amount of animation.” The Weather Channel is a regular client for Tube Creative, and the studio was recently called on to create a promo for the net- work’s new Flick and a Forecast show on Fri- 26 Post • June 2010 feel that helps with the energy,” explains Downs. “In the ‘Take a Ride on a Tornado’ frame, the tornado is built out of a simple spline that was duplicated a number of times, put into z-space in After Effects and rotated.” Tube Creative and Downs didn’t want to use a scary tornado but something more playful; same thing with the word Avalanche, which appears straight and then tilts downward.“The spot wasn’t supposed NYC’s Thornberg & Forester (www.thorn- bergandforester.com) completed the branding for Vutopia, a new on-demand movie service from inDemand’s Cox Communications. “They were looking for Vutopia to be ‘shiny, happy and fun,’” ex- plains T&F’s creative director/co-founder Scott Matz. “These became buzzwords to describe the Vutopia destination. Not only did we brand the network with IDs and a vast array of navigational elements, but we wrote, designed and animated a se- ries of 14 genre-specific asset bumps that launch the viewer into his selected film. Vutopia’s iconography is something we embraced by giving character to, and personifying each, film genre. Sound de- sign became key as well within the pieces.” They used sketchpads first, then Photoshop, Maya and After Effects. to be foreboding, it was just supposed to be about energy,” he explains.“The word Avalanche was animated in Cinema 4D.We used Mograph to give it a natural reaction as it struck the plane of the floor. Mograph is something numerous designers are using now for realistic movements.” It’s common for Tube Creative to shoot For client Turner Classic Movies and its annual “30 Days of Oscar” event, Holly- wood’s yU+co. (www.yuco.com) was chal- lenged with showing 90 seconds of film clips from multiple Oscar-winning films, while keeping it “magical.” They placed the audience on a flatbed at camera level and created a fantasy CG editing machine that operates just like the real thing, light- ing up the moving filmstrip. Says Blind CD Richard Taylor,“We had characters and el- ements move from the filmstrip out onto the flatbed.” He shot reference stills and running footage of a flatbed to replicate the speed and look of a film as it runs through the machine and around the metal sprockets. Elements were created in Maya and After Effects and composited in Nuke, with most shots having at least 6-8 layers. www.postmagazine.com inserts and elements, and they call on Pana- sonic’s HVX200 as well as the Canon 5D. Shooting their own elements provides more flexibility in terms of the creative. Downs points to a project they did for Fine Living Network.“It was for 15 Xtreme Outdoor Pro- jects.We had a tight turnaround and needed something quickly, so we looked to our own backyard.We took a shovel and the HVX200 to our parking lot and shot background plates to incorporate with the graphics.” He mentions another Weather Channel piece where they froze big sheets of ice and shot them with a BB gun on the stage in order to capture those textures.“That kind of thing would take forever in 3D to design or build and it would never have the same feel.We used the shards of ice to dress the edges of our spot,” concludes Downs. continued on page 45