Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/14320
Fractured Fairytale A rtist-owned and -operated bi-coastal effects boutique Brickyard VFX recently created CG frogs that appear alongside live counterparts in a new fairytale-inspired commercial for Mitsubishi entitled “No Fairytale.” The ad puts a new spin on the classic “Princess and the Frog” tale, while highlighting the sleek and sporty design of the new 2010 Mitsubishi Lancer. The 30-second TV spot follows the Lancer as it winds down a beautiful mountain road. The ad illustrates some of the Lancer’s safety features as it swerves and stops short to let an unexpected throng of frogs cross the road. CG work and editing follow, as the viewer sees the woman behind the wheel emerge and walk through the group of frogs. The hero frog begs the woman for a kiss. She obliges, turning the amphibian into a prince—but much to her dismay, the prince falls in love with the Mitsubishi and takes off. An alternate Internet-only spot accompanied the TV campaign. In this version, rather than transform- ing into Prince Charming, the frog turns into the pop musician formerly known as Prince, who gets left in the dust by the woman and her Lancer. Brickyard provided a variety of effects to this spot, Brickyard VFX makes dreams come true for Mitsubishi customized shaders, the group was able to achieve a number of different looks, colors, and textural variations on the frogs in the scenes, so it felt like a crowd of hundreds. Versions of the spot were created in both French and English (the commercial aired in Canada), with frogs talking in both languages. Unpredictable weather conditions presented another chal- lenge for the Brickyard crew. On location in the hills of Vancou- most notably extensive CG work in creating the plethora of frogs. “Frog handlers brought in 20 frogs, but most were too small for the spot, so we ended up shooting just two real ‘hero’ frogs. The rest are a combination of CG and composites,” says Brickyard lead 2D artist Patrick Poulatian. While the majority of the frogs are CG, for one close-up, the Brickyard team carefully layered shots of the real frogs to create the illusion of hundreds of frogs in the road. The hero frog in the spot is a combination of live action and CG; a CG mouth and eyes gave Brickyard artists the freedom to animate his speak- ing lines and manipulate his eyes and brow to sell the realism of a talking frog. Many of the scenes were shot as clean plates as well as secondary passes, with a few real and fake frogs placed into the scene. This provided both real-world scale and lighting refer- ence for their replacements. The hero frog (toad) was photo- graphed in multiple positions for model reference and texture extraction, which provided the basis for the CG frogs. From there, three different frog models were created by the artists: two with the ability to be modifi ed into a larger number of vari- ants for the crowd shots and one hero for the dialog shots. Using a combination of UV texturing, projection mapping, and 6 USER FOCUS: BROADCAST July 2010 Brickyard used a variety of 2D and 3D techniques to create a modern-day fairytale to advertise the Mitsubishi Lancer. Among the tasks, the artists created a bunch of realistic CG frogs. ver, British Columbia, the weather fl uctuated between bright and sunny, and overcast and rainy. “We ended up balancing shots by adding matte paintings of mountains and skies to mesh environments for better continuity,” says Poulatian. To create this spot, the Brickyard crew used Autodesk Maya for the CG modeling, animation, and lighting; Pixar Render- Man for shading and rendering; Adobe Photoshop for texture painting; Pixologic ZBrush for displacement map creation and texture manipulation; The Foundry Nuke for rough compositing and image manipulation; Autodesk Flame running on HP work- stations for compositing; and Autodesk Flare for rotoscoping. On the hardware side, the VFX team used 64-bit quad-core Dell Precision workstations running Fedora Core 11 Linux for the 3D animations. The imagery was processed on a render- farm of a Dell server and Boxx render nodes. Creating any size crowd, especially with a tight production turnaround, is always a technically challenging undertaking, says Poulatian. “Although the commercial only required a few hundred frogs (as opposed to tens, or hundreds, of thou- sands), it was imperative that each frog could be controlled,