Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/246736
vfx for commercials Lucky Post's Seth Olsen and Sai Selvarajan collaborated on this Ram truck spot, which has a Texas theme. to his aid in many tight spots. "We had a very quick turnaround for a commercial of this scope and length, and there was a fair amount of VFX work in it," says Chris Knight, creative director at The Mill LA. "The shoot finished on Tuesday, they edited for a couple of days, conformed on Friday and we delivered on Monday night. So we had to make sure we had our team — 2D artists on Flame and Nuke, Maya and Houdini animators, Photoshop matte painters — positioned to get the work done." Knight was on-set for the five-day shoot at Sony Studios; Ventura, California; downtown LA; and Chinatown. "VFX help the story along, but everything was shot so wonderfully — I mean Edward Norton is Edward Norton: His casting brought the filmic scope they wanted for this commercial." Van Heijningen and DP Alwin Kuchler used an Arri Alexa camera with anamorphic lenses to capture the action. Knight notes that to save time, The Mill began its VFX work on raw plates. "They didn't grade until Saturday. We received all the graded plates as well as LUTs for each shot from Company 3 Sunday morning. We could apply the LUTs to the raw passes of the shots we had been working on to match their grade." The biggest VFX sequence in the spot involves Norton emergency piloting a private plane and getting instant flying lessons via his Droid phone. The Mill modeled and animated the jet from scratch; it's seen in a wide shot plummeting to earth with a highresolution matte painting for background and CG clouds filling the foreground and midground. The plane interior was shot at Sony Studios; The Mill added clouds to a light blue cyc outside Norton's cockpit window repli24 Post • January 2014 cating the sky. The company also composited the Droid phone, mounted on the dashboard, over a photo of a yellow lined pad so the phone's screen would pop from the instrument panel. The Mill handled the phone's screen shots throughout the spot; in the cockpit the Droid's flying instructor quickly tutors Norton on the basics — the company added shake to the screen to simulate the vibrating camera rig used to shoot the interior. Despite help from the Droid, Norton crash lands the plane, which is glimpsed in a field as our hero is eyed by a menacing hillbilly and his goat. The Mill composited the crashed CG plane into the location shot and used a matte painting to add rubble and debris. "We went from the idea of the plane landing safely with no pyro or smoke to having the plane crash its nose into the ground and adding the damage," Knight explains. The Mill also supplied a glowing screen for an underwater sequence in which Norton's hand (actually a prosthetic) valiantly holds the phone above the water line as he's chased through the night by men with torches and dogs. "They kept the phone turned on in the prosthetic hand to give us a good sense of how to light and reflect the new screen in the water when we comped it in," says Knight. The Mill cleaned up the Chinatown alley shot to give the impression that the pack of dogs chasing Norton came out of an actual restaurant kitchen, where they were not allowed. The company gave an extra golden glow to the key around the girl's neck — which ultimately ends up in Norton's stomach. They comped his stomach X-ray onto his Droid screen, added a hospital wall extension and comped a bank vault door www.postmagazine.com into a shot that reveals the safe deposit box opened by the key. The final body bag-drop shot — which presumably leads to Norton waking up in the morgue — was photographed at night with a dummy in the plastic bag, downtown LA in the background and practical dust and smoke in the midground. It took some trial and error to nail the shot, but Knight says, "You always want to get as much in-camera as you can, even if you're not facing a time crunch." At The Mill, Felix Urquiza, Blake Guest, Matt Bohnert and Ashraf Ghoniem were the 3D artists; Knight, Margolit Steiner, Daniel Thuresson, Chris Payne, Jake Maymudes and Tara DeMarco were the 2D artists; Andy Wheater was the matte painter; and Byron Slaybaugh did the motion graphics. The clouds created in Houdini were rendered in Side Effects' Mantra; the plane created in Maya was rendered in Arnold. SUBWAY What better way to introduce soccer legend Pele as the newest member of the Subway team than with a visual approximation of his achievements on the pitch? In a spot from MMB Boston and featuring visual effects by Boston's Zero VFX (www. zerovfx.com), Pele sits on a white chair on a white platform against a white cyc as a samba begins to play. The voiceover welcomes him to Subway as the camera pulls back and a black-and-white patterned soccer ball falls from the ceiling. It's quickly joined by another, and another, until the screen is full of bouncing balls, and Pele does some finger math as he muses about his 1,282 lifetime goals. Wait! Make that 1,283 goals — one more soccer ball drops and bounces onto the platform. Pele catches it and playfully heads it off stage. Sticklers for accuracy take note: There really aren't 1,283 soccer balls falling from the ceiling or Pele would have been buried under their volume. But the masses of tumbling and bouncing balls hint at Pele's incredible career, and their rhythmic choreography lends a fun Brazilian carnival atmosphere to the scene. The ad agency's creative vision was to have Pele surrounded by the passel of soccer balls. It was up to director Brad Parker of Bob Industries and Zero VFX to create the world —- some in studio and some digitally. "As the cut evolved, the agency creatives wanted to change the tempo and crescendo of the soccer balls, so we kept a couple of [practical] hero balls and added more CG balls, which were more sculptable for timing