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B UENOS AIRES, ARGENTINA — Laboratoon, the Steinbranding (www.steinbranding.com) company that creates animated content and brand characters, is celebrating its fifth year of work with Doki, the host of the Discovery Kids Latin America channel. Since its cre- ation, the studio has produced animated content that features Doki for branding, in- terstitials and other video clips. Laboratoon's main tools are Adobe Illus- trator and After Effects. The studio also col- laborated on Doki's first live show, Doki Live — A World to Explore, which was carried out in several cities across Latin America. 42 Post • January 2010 www.postmagazine.com L ONDON — Envy (www.envypost.co.uk) recently created visual effects for a new Swatch spot out of RH Advertis- ing. Seasons, produced by Crossroads (www.crossroads- films.com) and director Harvey, shows a surreal golden snowball fight that takes place in deep black space. As each golden-silhouetted character throws their ball, a sparkly comet trail follows. An explosion of metallic glit- ter is released upon impact. The spot closes with a golden snowball hurling toward the camera and exploding into a shower of sparks that reveal the Perles D'Encre Swatch. Envy worked closely with Harvey in the studio, monitor- ing the blacked-out set and gold glitter snowballs, which proved to be pretty messy. There was glitter everywhere! Envy used Autodesk/Softimage|XSI to create the 3D elements, and Nuke and Smoke for compositing. Credits include lead visual effects artist Marcus Dryden, Nuke artist Olivia O'Neil, visual effects support/particle gener- ation artist James Knopp, 3D artist Howard Bell and pro- ducer Rachel Stones. Eddie Yanez of Point Blank in London created the origi- nal soundtrack. Simone Grattarola at London's Rushes was colorist on the project. OKI DOKI GOLD DUST L OS ANGELES — The stop-motion ani- mation pros at Duck Studio's Screen Novelties (www.duckstudios.com) created a new opening sequence for the SpongeBob SquarePants' 10th anniversary special on Nickelodeon. The piece runs roughly :45 and takes the show's star on a rollicking adventure beneath the ocean and into outer space, all through landscapes handcrafted by Screen Novelties. Stop motion was shot with a Nikon D300 Digital SLR. The pirate shot was captured with a Canon 510 xl Super 8 camera. For video-assist, the studio used the Animation Toolwork's LunchBox Sync and Dragon Stop Motion soft- ware. Compositing was performed in house using After Ef- fects. Gen Arts' Sapphire plug-in handled flicker removal, and Final Cut Pro was used for the rough edit. The final edit was done at Nickelodeon in Burbank on an Avid. P O S T I N G S HAPPY B-DAY SPONGEBOB B URBANK — Modern VideoFilm (www.mvfinc.com) provided finishing work for James Cameron's stereo 3D film Avatar. Every frame of the film, as well as all the trailers and promotions, passed through Modern's pipeline, which includes three Quantel Pablo stereo 3D systems. The studio used its Pablo systems for conform and stereo 3D checking, adjustment and quality control. The systems were also used to handle all the stereo 3D English subtitling required for the Navi language used by some characters in the film. The film is being presented in both 2D and 3D, and at three different aspect ratios. To deal with the workload, Modern renamed all of the shots to a common naming strategy and distributed them onto the company's SAN. From there they were pulled into the Pablo systems where they were checked using Pablo's realtime stereo 3D toolset for stereo and technical quality, then conformed against multiple lists from editorial. One of the Pablos had 12,000 clips online, and all three machines were used throughout post on the film. AVATAR IN STEREO