Computer Graphics World

April 2009 20 n n n n Broadcast•Stereo as though it came from a different world. ese were all animated in Adobe's Flash by Kwok Fung Lam. Once the edit was locked, animation began. "is is always the fun part of the project, as it's the chance for directors to insert as many details as they can," says Cowell. At Framestore, visual effects supervi- sor William Bartlett, assisted by Darran Nicholson, did the compositing within Autodesk's Flame. Bartlett notes that the company's chief contribution was making the avatars appear as if they didn't quite belong in the real world. ey did so by adding "digital scuff," or a bit of noise and compression. "We have various features in [Autodesk] Flame that can mimic what JPEG com- pression looks like, as well as scanlines and RGB color shifts, to make [the characters] appear as avatars you'd see on a computer screen," says Bartlett. "We were doing the finishing touches, but Nexus led the job." Scarecrow General Electric Director: Traktor Agency: BBDO New York Production company: Traktor, Venice, CA CG company: Framestore CFC NY Selling something as seemingly abstract as a "smart grid" sent General Electric to Oz. BBDO New York and Traktor brought the famous scarecrow back to life, and he, in turn, brought GE's product to life with some "warm and fuzzy" thrown in for good measure. "It was an interesting challenge for us," says David Hulin, Framestore CFC NY visual effects supervisor. "We do character and creature animation, and scarecrow was a humanistic, naturalistic character." To create a humanistic character, it made sense to shoot a real person, and that's what the group did. A dancer, wear- ing a blue suit with markers, stood on a 20-foot platform and performed the movements—some of the more acrobatic ones requiring him to swing on wires. is capture wasn't motion capture in any tra- ditional sense of the word, but the blue suit and markers were a way to get a bit of a leap on the painstaking rotoscoping that would be required to replace the actor's body with a CG scarecrow body. "We did it a bit like mocap, without the mocap," says Framestore NY lead Flame art- ist Murray Butler. To add to the realism and physicality, a practical scarecrow head was built, which the dancer wore during the film- ing. After the shoot, a team rotoscoped the actor by hand—"a huge job," notes Butler. Senior TD eo Jones, who was CG lead for the commercial, notes that the spot ended up being 90 percent CG. at's because, ultimately, the physical scarecrow head worn by the actor didn't work as planned, mainly because of issues with articulation and lip sync. Suddenly, it close eye on how the shots fit together. "It's hard for your eyes to keep up with depth jumps, such as when a shot that's deep cuts to one that's close," he notes. "We smooth out the transi- tions by adjusting the stereo across the cut. It's invisible to the viewer but makes it easier to watch." McNally continues: "When you cut a trailer, the pieces are now rearranged and trimmed tighter than before, so the blend- ing pass becomes much more important. A trailer is more like an action sequence, so we have to craft the transitions to keep up with the depth jumps." McNally also brought on the Danish company Color Code 3D, which provides a technical process to ensure color fidelity in 3D; the general 3D process often results in less brightness and muddier colors. "Color Code took the images, put them through the soft- ware process, and then checked them with the glasses," explains McNally. "The colors need to be pure. In cinema, the colors are pretty much how we want them. In the 3D version, we do a slight color correction to deal with the tint of the glasses. In that sense, when you go to the 2D and 3D versions of the movie, you see full color as we've designed it. The idea is to preserve as much of the color as we can while gaining as much depth as we can." It was important to have the trailer look fantastic since, after all, it's a little taste to get viewers interested in the movie. "3D is now a completely different experience in the movie theater, where it's more controllable than it was in the 1950s," says McNally. "Jeffrey Katzenberg is behind 3D and wants to show that we're behind it. Seeing Monsters vs. Aliens in the theater will be like being at the Super Bowl rather than seeing it on TV." –Debra Kaufman The crew had to composite CG characters into live action, coordinat- ing the stereo settings as much as possible ahead of time. Transitions from deep shots to closer shots had to be gradual.

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