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www.postmagazine.com 27 POST MARCH 2015 previs for the Mercedes-Benz Super Bowl spot, Fable, from Merkley + Partners/ NY. Robert Stromberg directed for RSA Films; MPC Advertising in New York and LA did the animation for the clever com- mercial, which updates the tale of the tortoise and the hare. When the speedy, self-confident hare stops to play poker with some woodland pals, the tortoise discovers a Mercedes-Benz plant and drives off in the high-performance AMG GT S to (spoiler alert) win the race. Cheng met Stromberg when the latter was a production designer on features. Cheng did a previs pitch for Disney's Maleficent, for which Stromberg direct- ed, and The Third Floor London later did previs. "Robert loves previs and ap- proached us for Fable," which combined whimsical character animation with live-action running footage and some real forest locations, Cheng says. "Robert gave us his brief and the boards he had drawn, and we dug into our own assets to find creatures to fill out the woodland — a fox, crow, squirrels, hedgehog — and built the lush fantasy forest from a concept painting of his." From those elements, The Third Floor created a "realistic but very stylized" previs for the spot that "represented the flavor of the main characters. They were animated but didn't have sophisti- cated facial controls," he explains. "The previs helped determine what shots were needed and how to shoot them — the camera angles, the timing. It was a launching point for MPC to refine the shots and add personality as they creat- ed final animation." Previs and postvis have become commonplace for spots and features today, he notes, "especially those very dependent on CG environments and characters. It's part of the creative and post process." The Biblical epic, Exodus: Gods and Kings, for which The Third Floor created previs and postvis, was a recent client. "Postvis played a significant role with so many virtual environments and the need to see shots cut in context," Cheng says. The Third Floor received two VES nominations for Virtual Cinematog- raphy for Edge of Tomorrow and X-Men: Days of Future Past, the latter of which won the category. The Third Floor London, which uses Maya as its primary animation tool, recently added Unreal Engine 4, a suite of integrated tools for game developers, to its arsenal. "It lets us walk around in scenes and render scenes with lights and effects in realtime," says Cheng. Game engine integration "ties togeth- er nicely" with the VR tools the company has begun to use in previs. "We've done virtual cameras for years with directors like Robert Zemeckis," Cheng notes. "VR takes virtual cameras to the next level. Imagine a production designer or direc- tor able to walk around and scout the set in VR. We hope to see it used more and more to get a sense of space and scale, especially for CG environments." BARABOOM! Culver City, CA's Bara- boom! is also looking at the role VR might play in previs. "We're playing with Oculus, to see how it fits in the pipeline," says founder and previs supervisor, Pepe Valencia. "You need to embrace all new technologies." About two years ago the company invested in 3D printers, so it has the option to print out scaled previs charac- ters and sets in three dimensions. "It's a really effective tool for art directors and production designers," he says. "We did previs for a live-action feature where a character was a 30-foot creature; we could print her out to see the scale and volume related to the set." Even Maya is "much more power- ful today," Valencia reports. Running Viewport using the DirectX 11 rendering engine gives one-click, realtime access to depth of field, motion blur, effects shaders and displacement mapping, he notes, "allowing us to get a look closer to the final product. We just did previs for a commercial using a preview of fluid sim- ulations in Maya. It looked finished — but we didn't intend for it to be a final shot. Just a tool to help the director envision and anticipate the shoot." Baraboom! did extensive previs for the 3D animated feature from Reel FX Creative Studios, The Book of Life, which was released last fall and is now avail- able on DVD. A universal tale of love and loss, it's based on Mexican folklore and was co-written and directed by Jorge Gutierrez. Valencia met the director years ago and admired his first short, Carmelo. They kept in touch as he developed the idea for The Book of Life. "Almost all the film's sequences were laid out with storyboards except for the bullfighting scene, the scale of the giant bull and the action sequences," he explains. "There was a script but no storyboards, and Jorge wanted to know how to shoot these scenes, where to place the camera" before the animators got to work. A Spaniard who's familiar with bull- fighting, Valencia led a team of eight art- ists who delivered 18 minutes of bullfight- ing and action scene previs representing close to 300 shots. "Jorge came up with a reference for the sequence: Sergio Leone spaghetti westerns," says Valencia. "It was like a shoot out between the bull and Manolo the bullfighter with really specific close ups beautifully integrated with the environment. "Jorge wanted to explore the camera lenses, the POV of the camera in the plaza, the scale of this huge bull. We provided coverage, giving him options and variations to send to editorial to create the pace and timing. The first sequence we did gave him 90 percent of the camera moves he used; it wasn't our intention to be that close to the final but Jorge told us we really nailed it with the Sergio Leone reference." Baraboom! needed to develop some facial expressions for the animated char- acters, which can be time consuming in previs, Valencia notes. So artists grabbed facial expressions from the character de- signs — sadness, smiles, surprise — and applied them to the lead actors. The company also did previs for the chase at the film's conclusion, a dynamic sequence when the villains come to fight the villagers. "We previs'd more than 50 characters at once, really intensive work, and were really happy with the results," he says. "Previs was instrumental in materializing Jorge's creativity." PREVIS VALENCIA Baraboom! did extensive previs for the 3D animated feature The Book of Life.