Post Magazine

38 Post • October 2008 www.postmagazine.com creative process star ted with coming up with cool transitions and linking one shot to another. It was a ver y collaborative affair with the agency and editor. There was a team of us." This compositing project was done in Flame, running on Linux 64-bit with GenArts Sapphire sparks and The Foundry's Furnace, and incorporating some 3D elements cre- ated in Autodesk Maya. Bennett appreciated Flame's warping and color matching capabili- ties, which he used to generate grids and meshes to build the transitions, and rather than just using that as its own effect, he in- stead used it as part of an effect. T H E AG E N C Y "Limey was par tly inspired by agency treatment," says Johannes Gamble, director of Super Studio (www.superstudio.tv) in Santa Monica." They had a great place to begin, and I was inspired by their initial treatment and was able push it from there. It's different on every project…inspiration for this particular project was strange because I went for the most simple thing I could think of — I was in- spired by simplicity." Limey is a goofy lime/man who appears in a viral campaign of :45 spots for Bud Light Lime on the Internet (try Limey Skates, Limey Coasters and Limey Breakdancing on YouTube). Gamble composited them from different plates and pieces. Gamble used his animation schooling and skateboarding back- ground to give the spots an offbeat sensibility that plays a bit beyond real for laughs and looks choppy to fit right in with the Internet's often amateurish home videos. "The costume doesn't make any sense," he says. "You know it's a costume and a real person but the scale's not right.You can see that it's not CG but you can also see that it's impossible, so I like that it's sor t of a trick." Limey does not look like an animated M&M character. The biggest challenges were filling, paint and patchwork, Gamble says, like cloning some of the costume holes away (for eyes, arms and legs). Breakdancing was the hardest because he couldn't wear the top costume piece since he had to headspin. With only the hip movement showing, they had to roto the arms and move them down, plus do a lot of paint and patchwork on the costume. Limey Coasters is a montage of his great- est beer coaster throws. Compositing this mixed elements of Limey shot in two pieces, shot in one piece, the coasters shot real with practical effects, the coasters as CG. Limey Skates was shot in two passes: One is a plate with a motion control head and the other is Limey's actual stunt. "He's basically rotoed," explains Gamble. "He has two parts of his costume. He has a lime on his head and a lime around his waist.The lime around his head and his arm are looped, they're ro- toed out and moved down to his hips where his other lime piece of costume is. It kind of cuts his height in half and moves the person's arms down." Gamble used After Effects CS3 running OS X on a Mac Pro dual-quad core work- station as his main compositing tool. He re- lies on Automatic Duck for getting his footage from Final Cut to After Effects with- out having to reconform it. "The agency was massaging the edit a lot and they can rough out the edit and get ever ybody signed off on that, and then shoot it over to AE," he says. C O M M U N I C AT I O N "Our motion graphics design work and compositing is often influenced and inspired by our ar tistic vision of what the spot needs to communicate," says Ken Carlson, creative director of Big Machine Design (www. big- machine.net) in Burbank. "The color tonality and contrast in a spot work together to build a mood. We're conscious of that and work hard to push a direc- tion that we think is right. Obvi- ously, the entire production is a collaborative process and the client is the one that's paying for our ser vice, so the opinions of our clients are very impor tant. However, if we think a client is going in the wrong direction, we will try to persuade them to re- consider a different direction." Carlson grew up in a family of ar tists, went to broadcast journalism school and does Dedication Commitment Performance Get out in front and stay there... second place has never been an option. ScheduALL is the industry's leader of Enterprise Resource Management software to the global broadcast and media market. +1.954.334.5406 www.scheduall.com Miami | London | Los Angeles continued on page 60 This Bud Light Lime campaign features a home video feel. Super Studio's Johannes Gamble was inspired by the project's simplicity. The Art of Compositing

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