Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/221535
Wizz and the directing team CRCR treated live action, shot with a Canon 5D camera, in post with TVPaint, After Effects and Photoshop for a promo for Pond. Linsk notes that, "the level of execution on the Rdio work has been extremely high, especially because these are largely personal pieces for our directors and animators. One of our goals was for viewers to see new things upon repeated viewings, so most of the films have been packed with detail." He believes "we wouldn't have had the same degree of creative freedom" if the promos were broadcast on television. "Knowing that these were Internet-only meant that our artists were free to create without fear of having their ideas tamped down. Rdio is a new media company and wouldn't exist without the Internet. As such, it just makes sense that these films be discovered, shared and commented on online." JARRITOS New York City's Charlex (www.charlex. com) tickles the funny bones of Internet viewers with its clever animated campaign for Jarritos, the Mexican fruit-flavored soda in glass bottles, from GSD&M/Austin for the general market. The three spots feature Day of the Dead-style skeletons, who appear as a hipster shopping in a bodega; a kid in a skate park trying to stick a straw in a pineapple until a Luchador [Mexican wrestling figure] peddling a Jarritos cart comes to his rescue; and glassblowers, who try to out-do each other in their fanciful creations. Artist Tamra Kohl's miniatures and dioramas of fanciful skeletons "set the tone" for the Web campaign, says Chrlx director Ryan Dunn. "The agency thought, 'wouldn't it be cool if these dioramas came to life?' They called us, and we began testing both stopmotion and CG techniques in parallel. They wanted the animation to look practically done, but we had a hunch that we'd probably need some way to maintain control of the animation in post production," something tough to do in full stop motion. So Chrlx built dollhouse-scale sets for all three spots and shot them on their stage with a Canon 7D camera. The sets' practical lighting made its way seamlessly to the CG world, where the characters were crafted. Dunn intentionally limited the artists' CG toolkit "so it would be similar to stop-motion animation," he says. "I didn't want a lot of face animation — I wanted to treat them more like traditional head replacements. We created a virtual head replacement toolkit so it wouldn't look too 'CG smooth' when the characters' eyes blink or mouths move. It was a case of using really expensive tools to achieve a comparatively inexpensive look." Those tools included Autodesk Maya for modeling, rigging and animation; Dragonframe software to capture the moving plates from the miniature sets; Pixel Farm's PFTrack for tracking the characters, glass bottles and graffiti; Nuke for compositing; and After Effects for final color correction. Rendering was done in V-Ray. A lot of time was spent on the fun task of getting the skeleton actors to perform. "You could tell when a performance was working the same as if you were filming live action," says Dunn. "The same rules and details apply," even down to the skeleton dog gnawing on the leg of his owner in the skate park. The :30 Glassblowers spot shows two workers misbehaving at their furnace, blowing their glass into a Lucha Libre mask, a mariachi accordion and — with as much lung power as a skeleton can muster — a visually impressive low-rider bike — all while they should be blowing Jarritos' famed glass bottles. According to Dunn, the hardest part of that sequence wasn't creating the transparent glass forms, but getting their motion to match the stop motion-style CG from one object to the next. "We couldn't just morph the performance," he says. "There had to be bumps and imperfections along the way." Pineapple is the only spot to feature an exterior set. "We had to create the illusion of a bigger space in the set; with some clever matte painting and by cheating scale with some forced perspective, we pulled it off effectively," Dunn says. The spots were released on the Jarritos Website and other Web outlets, and Glassblowers played in cinemas on the Fourth of July weekend. "The venue didn't affect how we handled the narrative or visuals," Dunn points out. "We treated them as full-up spots, and the agency wrote them as such. We cut them as :15s and a :30, so they're ready to go for broadcast should that occur in the future." Iron Claw spent two days shooting Symantec's Natural Disaster. It was edited in Final Cut Pro. FORD MOTOR COMPANY An end-to-end native digital advertising company, Modus Operandi (www.modop. com) just created a Halloween-themed Yahoo home page takeover for Ford Motor Company's Mustang brand and Team Detroit. With Yahoo's home page tallying 43 mil- Easy Edit targets online work JACKSONVILLE, FL — Easy Edit Video (www.easyeditvideo.com) recently added a greenscreen studio to its facility, expanding their video production capabilities. Easy Edit Video president David Zuckerman says the addition was a response to increased demand for high-quality, budget-friendly videos by businesses and organizations competing for attention online. For as little as $500, Zuckerman says a client can come in, shoot a video in front of their greenscreen, have animated graphics added, and leave with a finished Web video. "Every business has a Website, and now with our in-house professional studio set-up, any business can afford to quickly add video content that can be used to better market their goods and services," he explains. "Internet video is the most powerful and affordable marketing tool we have seen in decades. Creating an effective Internet video doesn't have to be a major Hollywood production. We've streamlined the process so we can shoot and edit a :60 video in just two hours." In addition to the greenscreen, the new studio also features a teleprompter. www.postmagazine.com Post • November 2013 21