Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/246736
vfx for commercials Framestore's CG team crafted the levitating car shot at the end of the spot. The actual DeLorean was mounted on a forklift to give some distance from the car to the blacktop when the door was slammed and the car begins to rise. "We painted out the fork lift arms, replaced the background, tracked in CG tires, animated the wheels to spin and added the blue energy bar," explains RowanRobinson. "We augmented a subtle move on the lift off that gives sort of a wobble to the suspension and tires, which help sell the whole thing. "The last shot of the car flying away is entirely CG. There was no DeLorean model Reel FX created fullydetailed Transformers for this new Monopoly "Empire" commercial. 22 three- to four-week timetable. Mike McGee served as VFX supervisor. "We were all pretty excited to work on this spot," says Rowan-Robinson. "Certain things are iconic, and the DeLorean is one of them. We grew up watching these movies." accurate enough for our needs so we took measurements of the car on-set and lots of pictures to reconstruct it with Agisoft's PhotoScan photogrammetry software," he says. Maya was the modeling, animation and lighting tool; The Foundry's Mari the texturing tool; and Solid Angle's Arnold the renderer. "Photogrammetry was really useful for the texturing, shading and lighting; we took HDR references of the blue headlights and added volumetric lighting. The design department created the crackling electrical effects in a homage to the film." Framestore also added reflections on the ground to give a sense of where the car is located in space and twinkled the lights of the cityscape "to give a bit of life" to the background, says Rowan-Robinson. Everyone on the Framestore CG and design department teams worked concurrently; composting with Autodesk Flame "brought it all together" in an "insanely fast" agency in Dallas and New York, young people gather in a stunning, glass-walled apartment to play the fast-paced "Empire," where they compete to own the world's top brands. When a player lands on a brand square, he or she enters the world of that popular brand, enjoying the big-screen games of Xbox, joining Transformers in a heated battle, and shopping a dream closet of gear from Beats by Dr. Dre. A stylized, animated city of skyscrapers bearing bright neon billboards opens and closes the message. Reel FX founder Dale Carman, who directed the spot and served as executive creative director, says the brief for the commercial "was typical for Uproar and Hasbro: to show a lot of action in 30 seconds. With all the license partners for Empire — Xbox, Transformers, Beats by Dr. Dre — there were a lot of cooks in the kitchen and a lot of approvals required. In a situation like that it can be difficult to keep the creative train on the tracks." Post • January 2014 MONOPOLY EMPIRE While Dallas-based Reel FX (www.reelfx. com) is quick not to take credit for Hasbro's new Monopoly "Empire" flying off the shelves, the studio's animation and VFX for the liveaction :30 spot certainly amped up interest in the new board game. In the commercial from the Uproar! www.postmagazine.com One of the things that helped Carman steer the train was Reel FX's ability to turnkey the project from live-action production to creative editorial, VFX and animation, online finishing, color and audio. DP Kevin Althans, who shot the live action with a Red Epic, also served as VFX supervisor and later led the team that extracted mattes ensuring a smooth compositing process. Carman likes to previs every job and showed an animatic of the spot that the client enjoyed during prepro. Although he expected to shoot the apartment sequence on a greenscreen set, he lucked out when the executive producer of the live action, Steve Johnson, found a new loft in downtown Dallas with an incredible view eliminating the need for digital matte paintings or photogrammetry. Reel FX built out and stocked the Beats closet from scratch, getting approval from the marketer on-set as they selected outfits and headphones in colors that popped in the white shop. Creating the environment for the Xbox world was a bit more challenging since no working units or games were available at the time of the shoot. Reel FX crafted a greenscreen set for the big screens, obtained a special Xbox One to photograph on-set, then showed generic game footage to the young people to prompt an enthusiastic response. "We needed to get a performance from the kids showing them having fun and playing with full-body capture interactivity while nothing was happening," Carman explains. Real Xbox footage was composited into the big screens with The Foundry's Nuke as soon as material became available. Reel FX's animation skills came to the fore in the Transformers sequence, where one of the Empire players lands in the enormous hand of Optimus Prime. "When the client asks for Optimus Prime holding a kid with maybe Bumblebee in the background, it sounds really simple," says Carman. "But they needed it in three weeks, and Optimus Prime had to look equivalent to ILM's animation in the Michael Bay film. The Transformers had to be fully realized with all the detail you expect, and we did them almost completely from scratch" using Autodesk Maya and Chaos Group's V-Ray for rendering. The flying sequence through the stylized, neon-filled CG city that opens and closes the spot was inspired by package art and was created with Maya. Reel FX used Avid Media Composer for creative editing, Autodesk Inferno for online and Autodesk Lustre for color grading. Bou-