Post Magazine

same character fighting people for a blurry, ghost-like effect. All compositing tools run on custom-built workstations by Boldata running Windows XP. G O O D D I R E C TO R S What inspires? "Good directors, to be perfectly honest," says Glen Bennett, visual effects ar tist/super visor at Sea Level. (www.sealevelvenice.com) in Venice, CA. "Once they inspire me, they inspire me for- ever. Just by their eye, it's what they're able to see that no one else is able to see. And then they look to me to embellish it and fin- ish off their vision… how they frame a shot, how they capture something, how they envi- sion those effects working." Bennett went to ar t college in South- hampton, England, focusing on design and il- lustration for television. As a Flame artist, he stays away from scripts and code and but- tons to get a solution, preferring to use the paint tools as much as possible. He found a recent project with much rotoscoping work ver y therapeutic. "Not rotoscoping per se but physically painting on frames, one at a time is something that you can put you into a zone. It's like anyone who does painting; it can be very relaxing," he says. This job was great in many ways. It was a Guitar Hero videogame campaign for televi- sion starring American Idol finalists that aired this summer. He composited eight :30 to :60 spots created for DDB/LA, including one that starred Aerosmith.The final idea was to have several animated game characters blend into live-action band footage, ultimately becoming the actual live-action band members. "Just painting Steven Tyler over the shot... that in itself took three days," he says."A lot of people would give a roto artist material and have them do it, but I wanted to do it myself. It's a band of such stature I didn't want to run the risk of it being half right and then me hav- ing to correct it. Plus I wanted to make sure I could prep it in the way I needed it." When they star ted, "they came up with ideas that were pretty extreme but they did- n't have the seamless look," he says. "They didn't have that, 'How did they do that?' Ever yone's grown up with this technology and they know how it's done. It's a lot harder these days to come up with something that's a little more interesting than your basic morph or reveal. It's all ver y intangible, and when you're dealing with clients who are that creative it's ver y difficult to express what you want — they know what they don't want. Luckily they were under- standing of that creative process and gave us time to be creative, which is rare these days.The agency cre- ative director was very un- derstanding of the process as well — if you want some- thing a little different, you'll need a little more time to figure things out." Once they figured out whether to put the game action in with the live ac- tion or put the live-action characters in the game footage, they had to deter- mine ways to invisibly join it.They decided to magically transition the real Steven Tyler and then Joe Perry to the animated Guitar Hero ones but keep them with their real bandmates. So Bennett painted out Tyler and Perr y frame by frame. Next, he integrated live-ac- tion audience members into the shot, in front of the animated characters. The job was cut at Spotwelders in Venice, CA, which, along with the agency, had originally assembled some clips of game and live-action footage. It was Bennett who decided on the transi- tions and how it was going to work. "The cool thing about that brief — and this was something that Steven Tyler was really hands on with — he said, 'I want to see something that's never been done before. I want to see something that people are going to look at and say, 'How the heck did they do that?' Which is a great brief but daunting," says Bennett. "I'm a huge music junkie as well, which was ver y inspiring. The pressure was on but at the same time the inspiration was huge. We at Sea Level were given this raw footage and told to come up with ideas.The www.postmagazine.com October 2008 • Post 37 Elad Offer and Digit provided compositing work for the film Get Smart, as well as for the DVD spin- off called Get Smart's Bruce and Lloyd Out of Control (pictured).

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