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Dashing’s Rob Moggach: For this EA Sports MMA game commercial, the studio created a digital chain-link fence that surrounds the fighters; they also populated the arena with a CG crowd. that. He says,“We adapted many of the techniques we have already used — myself and the crew — over the years to be as efficient as possible.We incorporated orig- inal game assets as a base so we weren’t building geometry, and even things like an- imation cycles and textures we repurposed from the games as much as possible.” Parts that needed adaption were done in conjunction with a partner company Method works with in China.“Outsourcing, which has become common in feature films, is done less in commercials because of the timelines. But because we had that relationship already in place,we were able to take full advantage of it,” says Glass. Common sense played a role as well, he says.“A lot of it was being very care- ful with how we approached things and being smart in our decision making and management of the process.” One area where the team had a lot of creative license was with the color.“We looked at it like this is the real-world, live-action version of the game, which is a simulation,” says Glass. “Everything down to how real the color of the enemy ships and effects weapon fire actually looked on screen.They have different chal- lenges with the game, which is realtime.We took that advantage and the creative license that comes with it to make things feel more realistic while paying homage to the game’s ultimate look.” The spot, which was shot in Prague at an old iron and steel works, is about 50 percent live action at the start, including close-ups and the battlefield scenes. As Reach progresses, it gets more and more CG-heavy, and toward the end it be- comes almost entirely CG, including additional troops, anything that flies, and ex- plosions, which feature live-action elements . Method is a strong Side Effects Houdini/Autodesk Maya house and employed both packages on this Halo Reach spot. Houdini was called on for more of the ef- fects, procedural backgrounds and characters that were brought in from game as- sets.The hero characters were done in Maya.The studio also tweaked the anima- tion shots by hand, reports Glass.V-Ray and RenderMan were used for rendering. Glass believes a big turning point in VFX for spots over the last few years is that technology “is really starting to become the tool that we’ve dreamed of. It in- terferes less with the process.There is much more opportunity for creative free- dom and expression.This will result in even greater evolution of visual ideas.” DASHING/GLOBAL RING Visual effects supervisor Rob Moggach started Toronto-based Dashing (www.dashing.tv) about nine months ago.The studio is based on the best work practices experienced at other studios throughout his career. “I started in Toronto over 15 years ago, then moved between London, Los An- geles and even New York over the last 10 years, working for companies like Smoke & Mirrors, Asylum, Digital Domain, Method,The Mill and Nice Shoes, so I’m fortunate to have been exposed to different markets and different needs, both creatively and technically,” explains Moggach, adding that while Dashing is physically in Toronto, they work with clients worldwide. Like Method’s Dan Glass, Moggach is seeing less of a distinction between com- mercial and film effects — and even music videos and television. “It’s gotten to the point now where we just focus on producing great visual effects, regardless of the medium or resolution.Artists certainly care about exposure, but it’s more im- portant to feel like your working on the highest quality, truly progressive work, and giving that work the focus it deserves.” In keeping with that mantra of sorts, Moggach has adopted a model for Dashing that takes cues from live-action production houses: a core set of full- time creative leads is on staff and the bulk of the production artists are hired on contract as needed. “If you look at a production company, they don’t staff the grips, the camera de- partment and all the people that go into any big production,” he explains.“They have their main executive producers, bidding producers and, most importantly, the creative leads: the directors, who they have exclusive agreements with. It’s a model that we’re getting close to being able to adopt in visual effects for bou- tique facilities. I hire my creative leads, the supervisors and other visionary talents who are invaluable to the company, and we contract the rest.” As the industry matures and skillsets become more and more specialized, it just makes sense to hire these experts as they’re needed and many prefer this, Moggach says. “It’s not cost effective to staff a fluid-dynamics expert or a Massive crowd TD if you can contract the best for a project and then a completely differ- ent specialty on the next project. If you ask most studios what percentage of their staff is freelance or project-based, it’s surprisingly large. A lot of amazing senior talent prefers to work in this capacity.There is potential for them to make more money and have more freedom.When you do that you can keep your overhead low and work on more creative projects without being burdened by having a staff that you are paying high salaries to.” Moggach and Dashing worked with a streamlined team on a recent EA Sports MMA spot called Global Ring that was directed by HSI Productions’ Jason Smith for San Francisco agency Heat.The client wanted the viewer to feel as though they had a front-row seat for a mixed martial arts match. “For the end sequence, they wanted an impressive stadium location featured in the game. Production shot the ring and a few hundred extras on a stage in Brazil, and we took care of reworking the game assets and filling the stadium with a digital crowd,” says Moggach. In addition to building the CG stadium and populating it, Dashing built and tracked the chain link fence around the fighters, added signage, atmosphere and camera flashes.“We had a compact team, all of them were CG supervisor level,” explains Moggach.“In a really short period of time they were able to build a sys- tem quickly that replaced the need for expensive software, like Massive, in order to populate the stadium.A key element of this was making sure my artists are equipped really well.They were able to do a lot more with two or three ma- chines than some artists can do with 15.” That leads him to another trend:“If you embrace the technology that is avail- able now, and always stay on top of it, there is the ability to be more efficient in www.postmagazine.com January 2011 • Post 29