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 7 "There's no more suitable arena to unleash this magic than at the Super Bowl, an epic congregation when America stands to attention to witness a moment of greatness," says West. That would include the performances by the players, Perry, and, certainly, Framestore. Mercedes' Fable We all know the story of the tortoise and the hare. But for the Mercedes commercial titled "Fable," CG artists at MPC Advertising put a unique spin on this fairy tale, updated for 2015 sensibilities. "The director and agency wanted to keep that magical quality but with some edge," says MPC's Chris Bernier, CG lead on the project. The 60-second spot features two creatures – a turtle and rabbit – in a race, cheered on by their fans, other woodland animals. The rabbit is cocky, sure of himself. The turtle, slow but eager. When an opportunity presents itself in the form of a Mercedes-AMG sports car, the turtle is suddenly in the driver's seat, literally and figuratively. The spot contains a large amount of CGI, mainly in the form of the characters. A lot of the environments and the car were shot live action, with kicked-up leaves and debris added in post. "Every shot had some VFX element, from a large number of CG characters to set cleanup and augmentation," says Bernier. Most of the work was done by MPC's New York studio, with the Los Angeles, London, Bangalore (India), and Mexico crews assisting. At any given time, a core team of approxi- mately 15 worked on the project during a three-month period. MPC created 15 individual characters – including the hare, turtle, fox, mole, toad, crow, snail, possum, and more – and a number of variations of those animals. The models were built with Autodesk's Maya and tex- tured with Autodesk's Mudbox, Pixologic's ZBrush, and The Foundry's Mari. Some proprietary tools, along with Maya, were used for rigging. Lighting was done in Maya using the Arnold (Solid Angle) renderer. The Foundry's Nuke and Autodesk's Flame were the compositing tools. According to Graeme Revell, lead animator, there were dis- cussions about which animals would be bipeds and which would be quadrupeds. "The client wanted the main char- acters to be anthropomorphic and walk like a human on two legs, but during the race, they are on four legs," he explains. "So we had to build each of the main characters as both bipeds and quadrupeds, doubling our pipeline for those characters." The two types of character models differed in terms of their proportions – the legs are longer in one version than the other, the animal fatter and thinner. "The challenge was to make it look like the same char- acter, even though the shapes are different," says Bernier. The performances and clever place- ments in the shots helped make that happen. Another challenge was dealing with the large amount of furred or feathered animals appearing on screen at the same time – 12 of the 15 main creatures have fur or feathers. Using Furtility, a flexible, robust in-house tool from the MPC Film group, helped in this regard. "The Arnold renderer really crunches through the tons of curves and rendered the large amounts of geometry, which allowed us to really raise the fur count and detail on our charac- ters," says Revell. Cloth simulation was another challenge when it came to character creation. The hare, for instance, is wearing a jogging outfit, and the fox a referee's shirt. "So we used our fur system, then did the cloth simu- lation aer that," Revell empha- sizes. For the cloth simulation, the artists used Maya's nCloth. Bernier notes that the hare was the most complicated character from a technical standpoint, with the cloth, fur, some muscle sims, and so forth. This is also true from a story sense. "The first shot is a close-up of him talking, and as he does so, he whips off his sunglasses. In those two sec- onds you get a snapshot of his personality," he says. "He is the cool bad guy through the story, so nailing that performance right away was important." In that close-up, the hare model has more than one million hairs. Meanwhile, a camera car filmed the Mercedes traveling along an actual street. Even shots with the turtle appearing behind the wheel contain an actual car. Some of the scenes were shot in Portland, where the camera crew filmed the car and the woodsy environment. In fact, at the starting line of the race, a large amount of the foreground was shot on set, and anything behind the starting line was a matte painting, VFX, and set extensions. To give the ARTISTS INTEGRATED AT LEAST A DOZEN CG FURRY ANIMALS INTO LIVE BACKDROPS FOR "FABLE."