Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/27779
Broadcast n n n n ers. “It’s endless stuff,” says Harrison-Murray. “Te fire and ice dragons. Te matte behind for the sky and the mountains. A band of for- est and trees. A wall of smoke. And then each of those elements had to be broken down into separate render layers. Te snow had four, in- cluding diffuse and subsurface scattering, as did the trees. Tere were layers of CG crowds, and that was split into 10 different render passes. We had mid-ground, hand-animated surfaces for the Orc beast in the crowd. Te hero Orcs came in with about eight or nine different comp layers. Te ice dragon had lots and lots of different render layers, with glitter, specular, volumetric ice stuff. Plus, the fore- ground had interactive footprints where the armies had walked in the snow. Hero guys in the foreground…. I lost count. Tere were many, many layers,” Harrison- Murray adds. “It was tough on comp. We were pulling a lot of CG and content from different software and trying to give it a unified feel.” Group Effort While the Framestore film and commercials divisions share tech, they each have separate pipelines due to the differences in the scale of the projects they encounter. “We need our tools to be lightweight and easily customiz- able,” says Harrison-Murray. For “Siege,” though, the commercials group borrowed from the film group; the most valuable com- modity: people. “Tey were quieter in film at the time, and we needed to ramp up quickly; we had to double our size, and we got some good guys to help us out,” Harrison-Murray notes. Some of that assistance came from Houdini artists, who helped build the procedural forests with techniques used for Clash of the Titans. One of the major tech assets used from film R&D was the fur-grooming tool set, although the fur-rendering tools were not transferable since the film side uses Pixar’s RenderMan, while the commercials group uses Mental Ray for rendering out the hair. Yet, the help, whenever offered, was greatly appreciated—especially given the condensed timeframe of the commercial. “We had three months from start to finish,” Harrison-Mur- ray states. At the early stages, the project had a crew of a half-dozen, which ramped up to 60 at one point. Whether it’s the commercials or film group, Framestore is best known for its photorealis- tic CG characters set within live-action back plates. And while the team may have been taken out of its element for “Siege,” the results are nonetheless stunning. The canines in “Dog Sitter” required assistance from a trainer (top) and were filmed separately so the animals would not be distracted. The final scene (bottom) was a compilation of the various shots, including those with the human actors and the dogs, many of which required CG limb replacements. Bud Light: Dog Sitter When it comes to Super Bowl commercials, Anheuser-Busch’s Bud Light brand tends to get quite a bit of airtime, and this year was not any different. And when it came to cre- ating the digital work, at least for this year’s game spots, Te Mill, headquartered in Lon- don, seemed to be part of nearly every 30- or 60-second play. In all, the facility took on 19 commercials among its London, New York, and Los Angeles offices, including one of the top favorites, Bud Light’s “Dog Sitter.” Te premise of the spot is simple: A guy dog sits for a friend, who leaves him a refrig- erator full of beer, along with several canines that “are really smart and will do whatever you tell them.” Lots of beer plus smart, obedient dogs equals party (at least in the sitter’s mind), during which the canines act as wait staff, pour drinks behind the bar, spin tunes like a DJ, and even “man” the barbecue grill. No matter how smart the actors—in this case, the dogs—actually were, they needed digital assistance to pull off these human-like tricks. And that’s where Te Mill New York came in. In the spot, the dogs stand and walk upright on their hind legs, performing tasks— such as holding trays, washing dishes, flipping burgers—with their front paws. So, most of the post work involved removing rigs from each scene and then adding in new arms and the objects with which they were interacting. According to Tim Davies, VFX supervi- sor for the spot, for any profile dog shots, it was fairly easy to remove the rigs using a clean plate, as no part of the rig occluded the dog. But when the dogs walk toward the camera, two trainers holding a horizontal bar would stand either side of the dog. Tis rig, used to support the dog, would cover a large section of the animal’s upper torso and forearms, requir- ing extensive cleanup work. Davies, also the lead (Autodesk) Flame art- ist on “Dog Sitter,” was on set during the film- ing, and after each take, he would acquire a March 2011 23