Computer Graphics World

April 2009 22 became apparent that Framestore would also be replacing, in nearly all the shots, the scarecrow's head. Fortunately, Hulin, who attended the shoot, was able to bring the physical scarecrow head back to Framestore to be photographed and then accurately modeled. "It was already designed and built, which was good," Hulin says. In the end, the practical scarecrow head was retained in three shots; in all the other appearances, it was CG. Creating a believable scarecrow body was also a challenge. Jones struggled with the best way to create a rig that would realisti- cally represent the thousands of wires that compose the scarecrow. After trying Maya Hair from Autodesk and thinking about writing an in-house system, he built the rig using Maya nCloth. "It turned out to be a very dynamic rig," says Jones. "We made strips of nCloth and used its collision to simulate the collision in every frame, then cached it out. It took five minutes a frame to calculate all the dynamics." For both rotoscoping and animating the CG scarecrow, the crew relied on informa- tion gathered by two extra cameras on the set that were placed at 90 degrees from the principal camera. "We had three view- points to rotoscope from and animate," says Jones. Tricky bits included the shot where the scarecrow/dancer walks a tight- rope on electrical lines. "We shot the dancer on wires because he was doing acrobatic moves," adds Hu- lin. "But because he was on wires, he didn't have the weight and impact of a 170- pound guy. We had to spend time to ani- mate those physics back in, to feel that he was really metal and wire. We didn't want him to feel like an animated character but a real-world wire man." Framestore also built a set in CG and augmented that with matte paintings for the hills and sky, using Maya and Adobe Photoshop, and composited all the ele- ments in Apple's Shake before the final beauty composite. "In the final shot, the gate and cobblestones at the end were live action, but everything else was CG," Hulin says. Details that "sold" the scarecrow in- cluded the scarf he wears around his neck and loose wires wrapped around his waist and upper arms. "Every single shot has some hand animation," says Jones. "It was a huge animation job." Butler, meanwhile, did the composite in Autodesk's Flame. "e biggest chal- lenge was blending everything together to create an overall look," he says, "We gave the skies a Maxfield Parrish blue/yellow/ pink look—cool, but not overwhelming. And, of course, we had to get rid of the bluescreen dancer in every shot. at was painstaking and had to be done before we started the comp." Jones reports that, despite the massive amount of work, the job went remarkably smoothly. "is was a good spot to work on," concludes Jones. "It's nice to see a script with a creative idea you can get your arms around." Hot Item Bridgestone Director: Daniel Kleinman Agency: The Richards Group Production company: Rattling Stick/Epoch Films CG company: Framestore CFC NY A dune buggy, a UFO, and House of Pain come together in the rollicking comic Hot Item for Bridgestone tires. To the tune of the dance-floor hit "Jump Around," the spot requires no dialog as we see two space- suited men collecting rocks on a moon of Saturn…and returning to their buggy in time to see a UFO fly away with their Bridgestone tires. "ere was a design on paper," recalls Framestore TD David Mellor, who was the CG lead. "But it was challenging; the concept was quite loose. We had to de- velop it and make it work with the buggy, which was shot on location. As a result, we became involved with the design." e commercial was shot by director Daniel Kleinman in the Mojave Desert in California—and not just for the other- worldly terrain. "We knew the moon would be lit by a single source, and in the Mojave, you just had the sun in a big blue sky that could be that single source," says Mellor. Framestore senior producer James Raz- zall and compositor Murray Butler at- tended the shoot where, over two very hot days, Kleinman filmed the actors wearing spacesuits and careening around The GE scarecrow, which comprises thousands of wires instead of the traditional straw, was rigged using Maya nCloth. Hand animation and other subtle motions sold the concept. n n n n Broadcast•Stereo

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