Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/491590
m a r c h . a p r i l 2 0 1 5 c g w 1 5 across the car's surface. All the monsters contain Houdini simulations. In the Juke encounter with the potholes, the artists used sims to break up the ground as the creatures emerge from the pavement. Their jaws were animated in Maya, but the little bits of debris that fall off were simulated in Houdini. In the Rogue mud encounter, all the creature parts are slick and viscous, created with a sim. The Pathfinder encounter with the snowy tree uses simulations for the flinging branches and the falling snow. Some branches were animated in Maya and combined in comp. In the Murano encounter with the icy bridge, all the falling, snapping debris and smashing ice were simulated. According to Osborn, the biggest difficulty was controlling the creatures in such a way that they are believable and recogniz- able as monsters. The dripping mud and swinging branches with falling snow offered an extra challenge. Artists started off with character designs to establish a look for all the creatures and then built the underlying shapes and rigged them. Surfaces drove the mud sim over the struc- ture for the monster in order to keep the intended shape; particle sims were used along with practical elements when the creature crashes into the vehicle's windshield. "We combined as much reality as we could to make it as believable as possible," Osborn notes. "Mud is one of those things that is difficult to do convincingly. We also shot a lot of rain in camera to get all that interaction with the rain and the mud on the ground. But the rain in camera also made the CG integration more difficult." The group animated the tree in Maya, using grayscale models in all the shots. Because the branches would ultimately be sims and animated in Houdini, the artists had to import stand-in geometry in Maya that would visually represent the space the tree would take up in the shot. Then they simulated all the individual branches moving. "They were all created with a wire simulation, so as the character walked along the ground, the branches would bounce and react, and we would have all this secondary movement that made it feel convincing," Osborn says. In that tree sequence, the snow on the ground was real; the snow falling from the sky and from the tree were not. The snow sliding from the tree was linked to the animation and simulated in Houdini, while the flakes falling from the sky were generated in Maya. For the icy bridge, the artists used a great deal of practical ice but took it further using CGI. The big ice chunk that falls on the vehicle is real, while all the small- er incidental bits are digital. The group at MPC Advertising has encountered many challeng- ing scenarios over the years. And while the weather monsters in "Winter Allies" did their best to wreak havoc, the artists, like the vehicles in the spot, handled them magnificently. Pepsi's Hal ime Touches Down Commercials that air during the Super Bowl are very expensive, so companies making that investment have high expec- tations for the work. The good news is that the spots will continue to air aer the game. Yet, that was not the case for Pepsi's "Halime Touches Down" spot, as it was specif- ically designed to introduce the halime entertainment. Since it would only be live for 30 seconds, each one of them had to count. And they did, with out-of-this-world effects. "Every year the world's biggest TV audience tunes into the game with the expectation that something spectacular might happen, so from the moment Mekanism came to us with [Director] Tommy Means' genius idea for setting the stage for halime, we knew we had our work cut out for us," says Ben West, Framestore's director of the spot. Framestore directed and cre- ated all the effects in the piece, which has a UFO descending on Glendale, Arizona, the site of the big game. "Revealing the UFO as the stadium was always going to be the great payoff," West says. "In some ways, it's a no-brainer – that stadium really looks like a UFO." Nearly 20 people in the Framestore LA office handled the work. Post was completed in less than three weeks. It was up to Chris Eckardt, VFX supervisor, to bring West's concepts to fruition, which, for the most part, centered on the environments. In short, the idea was to get the idea across that this was the Arizona desert (which carries the mystique of alien encounters), and a spaceship touches down and transforms into the actual stadi- um. Before this, there are images that hint to the entertainment that's to come: a Pepsi machine, a Pepsi truck, guitars, and Katy Perry's iconic blue wig. When the spaceship hovers overhead and a beam of light floods the area, objects suddenly lose their battle with gravity. The practical effects were just as challenging as the digital effects for this commercial, as the live action required a massive amount of rigging and lighting to achieve the base ele- ments required to tell the story. In terms of visual effects, "a big part of the job was creating a seamless connection between what we shot and where we wanted to take it," West says. "We did a lot in camera, which gave us a good reference point, making things a little easier." Shooting took place in the California and Arizona deserts, " W e COMBINED AS MUCH REALITY AS WE COULD TO MAKE IT AS BELIEVABLE AS POSSIBLE." A CG MUD MONSTER INTERACTS WITH A PRACTICAL VEHICLE.