Post Magazine

January 2014

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and positioning, and could be placed specifically where they were needed," explains Zero VFX co-founder, Brian Drewes. While CG bouncing balls aren't on the difficulty level of, say, simulating fur, Drewes notes that "they all have a slightly different rotation at the beginning and when they hit the ground. We hand animated some important ones and built some simulations for the right gravity, rotation and momentum to get the feeling of natural variations. The Zero team worked very closely with the agency creatives to experiment with the timing of the crescendo of the soccer ball drops." Sean Devereaux was Zero's VFX supervisor and Mark Rienzo the on-site supervisor for the spot. HDRs taken on-set were used by animators to dial-in the lighting and accurately match depth of field. "The practical balls served as a reference for the way they should look — that was one of the reasons I opted to keep some balls live," says Drewes. In an effort to make the CG balls photoreal, the practical balls also acted as a texture reference. The animators actually crafted the full number of soccer balls to match Pele's scale it down to 2K in compositing," says Drewes.  "The extra resolution allows us to add an extra level of depth and gives a better look overall." Additional VFX included rebuilding most of the white platform with a matte painting since the real balls landing at Pele's feet spoiled the aesthetic of the shot. Artists also rotoscoped his chair and added slight touches of reflections in the chrome legs. Zero tapped Maya for all the CG, Nuke for most of the compositing and V-Ray for rendering. The spot was color graded and finished in Autodesk Smoke. lifetime goals but found that more than a thousand bouncing CG balls looked like they were menacing the sports legend.  So they cut back to a number that "seemed like a lot but could maintain a good tempo over the duration of the spot," Drewes explains. The animators had a scratch track to work with so they could "sense the overall tone and progression of the spot" when they began to choreograph the bouncing balls.  "When we saw the first hero ball make impact, we started the crescendo," says Drewes. The majority of the iterations concerned "timing with the voiceover and the editor's cut. We were able to do a lot of quick iterations because we use all cloud rendering, offered by our sister company Zync, and could scale up our renderfarm as needed." Zero rendered the CG at 4K resolution. "Whenever we get a chance we'll render at two-times resolution for CG then international production company Smuggler shot the campaign in Sofia, Bulgaria. MPC LA's VFX creative director Paul O'Shea met Beletic through a feature development project at Disney and knew the director shared his goal of "making sure we had as heavy a photographic base to the visual effects as possible; we attempted to get as much in-camera as we could." MPC LA VFX supervisor Ryan Knowles "directed the 2nd unit" in Bulgaria, O'Shea points out. "Although a lot of the crowds were Massivegenerated, there was also a healthy amount of real people doing stunts, which made everything more convincing." The spot, which Beletic "paced like a trailer," follows hero Marius from fighting in the woods and combating a minotaur on a craggy cliff to scoring gladiatorial triumphs in the arena and engaging hordes of warring barbarians sacking Rome.  XBOX The :60 spot launching Xbox One game Ryse: Son of Rome offers a new take on game promos: Instead of repurposing video game cinematics, the commercial reimagines the sword-and-sandal epic in live action — enhanced with VFX by MPC LA (www. moving-picture.com). San Francisco-based agency Twofifteenmccann devised the campaign, which includes four short films featuring the game's central character, Marius. Director Brian Beletic of MPC LA used CG and 2D elements to transform a "quite picturesque" Bulgarian forest into a battle-scarred and denuded clearing with blackened soil peppered with smoke and embers, says O'Shea. For the minotaur's rocky lair, an actual mountain location combined with a "fantastic matte painting" by Rocco Gioffre, whose credits include Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Blade Runner, and sky replacement footage shot in Montana. MPC LA also replaced a prop rubber axe head to give the illusion of reflective metal and performed head replacement to propel the decapitated monster's head in the right direction. An aerial view of the Roman arena was all CG; it was crafted in conjunction with production designer David Lee who "helped us with the look and details," says O'Shea. During the gladiatorial combat, particulate dust was added to the air and extras in the stands were tiled and extended in CG with photographic elements and Massive building out the rest of the spectators. The warring barbarians sequence followed "some of the styling of the game," notes O'Shea. Actors were shot fighting hand-to-hand on a greenscreen-backed staircase. Massive combat agents were generated to fill the enormous CG architectural environment, which seems to stretch to infinity. A pair of enormous golden doors leading to the palace was inspired by the reliefs on Trajan's Column. Gioffre created a matte painting of Rome burning seen over the shoulder of the emperor in the last shot. Maya was the chief animation tool, with CG compositing in Nuke, "sweetening and finishing" in Flame and compositing support from Flame's Flare support station. Massive software generated the battle agents and crowds and Side Effects' Houdini the atmospherics. V-Ray performed the CG rendering, and Mantra rendered the Houdini elements. Color grading, shared by Mark Gethin and Ricky Gausis running FilmLight's Base- www.postmagazine.com The Mill's VFX work enhances this Verizon spot promoting Motorola's Droid Maxx and featuring actor Edward Norton. continued on page 47 Post • January 2014 25

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