Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/221535
Advertising & the Internet lion unique views per day, the Halloween takeover captured the attention of a wide swathe of the driving public. Modus Operandi has worked with Ford Motor Company and its agency Team Detroit before, but this project was noteworthy for all the aspects required to come together in a single unit. The :06 takeover found a live-action Dr. Frankenstein, shot on greenscreen, tightening the last bolt on the wheel of a Halloweendetailed Mustang, chained in his lab. Ford supplied the CG car model asset, which Modus Operandi optimized and animated. When the vehicle came "Alive!" it revved its engine and peeled out. After the :06 takeover collapsed, a traditional video banner for Ford appeared at the top of the Yahoo home page, along with an interactive 300x250 companion unit on the right side. When viewers clicked on the 300x250, the Mustang pictured peeled out, ripped across the page and formed a car customizer, which enabled viewers to build their own Mustang with their choice of color, trim and other features. Charlex used stop-motion techniques to create Jarritos' three-spot campaign. 22 "The project had so many components that we had different teams working on parallel paths," explains Modus Operandi's LAbased co-CEO Miles Dinsmoor; Charles Lee, his CEO partner, manages the Modus office in Panama City, Panama. "There was the liveaction shoot; the CG team working with the live-action and CG assets building out the lab, lighting and animating it; and the programming team working on the car customizer code, as well as a 'Monsterize yourself ' UGC component. We were passing assets back and forth, making sure the customizer had the final render of the Halloween car and that Ford and Team Detroit were up to speed with work in progress." Although the core code for the car customizer had been built by Ford and Team Detroit and used in other applications, Modus Operandi had to create the anima- Post • November 2013 tion to move the Mustang from the 300x250 to its final place on the home page "and have it be pixel perfect as it traveled from place to place," Dinsmoor says. "Yahoo put the final pieces together, but it was incumbent upon us to deliver each component — video, ford. com car customizer, UGC — fully operational, and we had to create very precise animation to ensure that everything hit the right placement." Artists and animators tapped Maya for modeling and animation, and After Effects and Nuke for compositing. As audiences migrate in greater and greater numbers to digital platforms they've become more discerning consumers. "Standard banners are ubiquitous, so you really need to grab their attention with front page takeovers and road block units that synch banners and 300x250s," says Dinsmoor. "People also want to be more than passive consumers of advertising — you have to give them something to do. The confluence of these trends will lead to a lot more customized, rich experiences in the advertising ecosystem." At Modus Operandi, Aaron Sternlicht was creative director, Taylor Greeson director, Shannon Clune account director, Charles Lee executive producer, Hank Strong content producer and Ian Pescod digital producer. INTEL-TOSHIBA The Power Inside, a six-episode Web series from Intel and Toshiba, is the third collaboration by the two high-tech giants, but the first to take them down a fantastical path. In this series, the planet is threatened by menacing mustachioed insects called Uricks, and only an odd band of young people and a very reluctant hero can save the day. Agency Pereira & O'Dell teamed with directors Will Speck and Josh Gordon of Furlined on the project. Who better to create the VFX, which bring the hordes of Uricks to life, but Zoic Studios (www.zoicstudios. com), the Culver City, CA, company that knows a thing or two about creature effects? Zoic was involved early in the development phase of the series, which comprises more than 50 minutes in its entirety. Zoic artists crafted concept art for the Uricks, creatures which had to be able to conceal themselves on victims' faces (as mustaches for men and bushy eyebrows for women) while remaining insect-like when shaved from their hosts. "We went more for a dark comedy look," says FX supervisor Ryan www.postmagazine.com McDougal. "The directors didn't want to go silly or ridiculous." Artists used reference footage of desert spiders, crabs and moray eels to endow the Uricks with personality. "They had to do more than just skitter along," McDougal says. "Desert spiders had an interesting dynamic between fast and slow — very quick actions that were very exacting. They were scary without going too far." Maya and Pixologic's ZBrush were employed to model the Uricks and Maya to animate them. Joe Alter's Shave and a Haircut fur and hair software handled the creatures' intricate hairy form; V-Ray was tapped for rendering. Sometimes the actors wore practical mustaches that were replaced with creepy-crawly CG Uricks; sometimes even the un-animated mustaches were CG. The giant queen Urick, which appears in the final episode, was entirely CG. Zoic also created swarms of Uricks composited in footage of international landmarks to demonstrate the worldwide range of the creatures. A more concentrated swarm appears over LA's Griffith Observatory in the climactic episode. McDougal says the swarms of mustachioed insects, which formed "a tornado of hair — a hairnado," were a challenge to devise because "a horde of hair-covered, flying mustaches just doesn't play nice in CG." The directors keyed into the way flocks of starlings move en masse "all knowing where they're going at the same time" to choreograph the swarms. Just when viewers think the hero and his friends have dispatched the Uricks and Earth is back to normal, a new menace is revealed; a monster that grows out of a man's chest hair. "It doesn't really show too much of itself, but we needed to make something a little different from the Uricks — something humorous and weird," notes McDougal. Inspired by Medusa and snakes, Zoic grew the man's chest hair into long coils poised to attack. Zoic also created the red-eye effect that the Uricks' victims are stricken with and the dream sequence experienced by the hero. "The red-eye effect started with the idea of contact lenses enhanced in 2D, but that proved to be difficult to coordinate and unnecessarily expensive," McDougal explains. "So we took it on in post, with Nuke, where we could have a lot more control." The dream sequence was shot on greenscreen, and Nuke was used to composite elements such as lens flares and to build a highly dimensional, nebular cosmic world. Episodes were shot on Arri Alexa using