Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/8034
n n n n Broadcast lighting, and so on, but it’s not an exact sci- ence. Tere were a few circumstances where we needed an element.” To fill in the missing pieces, the team set up a greenscreen shoot, using a Canon 5D Mark II camera, on the rooftop at Te Mill. “We put people in the perspective we needed to use them as live-action components within the composite,” says Sarokin. “Te most im- portant thing was to expose things properly to match the time of day and lighting direction.” In post, Sarokin was the lead visual effects art- ist and Mabille was in charge of 3D. “Te main point was to have as many realistic-looking peo- ple as possible and that the animation of their interrelations made sense,” says Mabille, who used Softimage as his main 3D tool. All told, the group created nearly 200 digital extras. “Tere are a couple of live-action plates of the base of the pillar that we used, and then we extended them with CG people,” Mabille Despite the pre-planning, Te Mill NY had a mere three weeks to get the plates to delivery. Still, “our approach and the techniques we set up early on served us well,” says Sarokin. “We were able to make it look as amazing as pos- sible and add as much detail as we could.” FORGE • VIZIO Director: Wally Pfister, ASC Agency: Venables Bell & Partners Production company: Independent Media, Inc. CG company: MassMarket In this hyperkinetic spot, Vizio shows how the worlds of Internet video and television come together, as robotic arms snatch up singer Beyonce and place her inside a cubicle. As the camera pans, we see numerous cubi- cles, inhabited by the Numa Numa guy, the Twitter bird, musician Tay Zonday, a Flickr Te spot featured three sets of real cubicles, reveals Roy, but MassMarket then extended them with two computer-generated ones. “We added an extra row of them and then another set of five towards the back,” he says. Ten there were the robot arms, key ele- ments in the spot. Early on, the decision was made—for reasons of budget and time—to create them with CGI. “It’s actually cheaper to do it in CG than practically,” Roy points out. Te production built a one-ninth-scale arm that was filmed for lighting references. “As soon as we had the design for the ro- bot arm completed and approved, we built a CG version of that practical arm in the art department. We rigged it up so that it was ready before we finished shooting, which let us get started on the animation right away,” says Andrew Romatz, MassMarket visual ef- fects supervisor for 3D. Te digital content creation tool set that was used for the spot included Autodesk’s Maya, Adobe’s Photoshop, and Pixologic’s ZBrush, along with 2d3’s Boujou for camera tracking. Romatz and John Shirley, who was VFX supervisor for 2D, were both in attendance at the shoot. “Getting light- ing to match was important,” says Ro- matz. “A lot of times, it’s hard to get those reference shots during a busy shoot, but Wally [Pfister] was very accommo- dating. In fact, he shot a lot of reference shots in 35mm.” On set, the group collected all the neces- The Vizio commercial combines star power, pop culture, live action, and CGI—the latter involving robotic arms and more created by MassMarket. describes. “And we built the smaller pillars en- tirely out of CG people. All the shots looking down at the bridge are re-created in CG as well, because we didn’t shoot any live-action people from this camera angle.” Softimage’s Ice was used to refine the simu- lations and handle the massive amount of data. “Ice allowed us to organize and manage the information,” says Mabille. “We had to as- similate the whole bridge animation with the truck that presses down on the people, and had to have them all react accordingly and without stretching.” Te artists used Te Foundry’s Nuke to do rough comps before sending them to Autodesk’s Flame for final compositing. “It lets us know if our 3D comps are going to work,” says Mabille. 24 March 2010 sign, a Facebook page, characters from movies, and more. Getting a jump on the project, Mass- Market producer Paul Roy and his previs team started work between Christmas and New Year’s in anticipation of the four-day shoot that took place the first week in Janu- ary at the Santa Monica Airport’s Barkar Hangar. Cinematographer Wally Pfister (Te Dark Knight, Te Prestige, Batman Begins) di- rected the commercial, his talents a perfect match for the spot’s moody look. “It was great working with Wally,” says Roy. “He is very familiar with 3D, greenscreen, and comps. He has done a lot of set extensions in the movies he’s done and worked with a lot of visual effects.” sary data, captured HDR panoramic shots for lighting reference, and worked closely with the video playback person to check the gray- scale and make sure it was the right angle. “It’s something you can’t foresee when you have a CG character pick up a 3D character,” Romatz explains. “You have to imagine timing and the impact of the CG, and anticipate how that will affect the live-action element so the actor can behave in a way that’ll look good.” Te team conducted numerous animation tests, working closely with Pfister to find the sweet spot. “Some of the arms have more of an attitude, some are smooth and slower in how they grasp and pick things up,” says Romatz. Getting the lighting to work properly was the biggest hurdle. “Te surface [of the ro- botic arms] was so flat and squared off at the edges, so it was challenging to keep the reflections from getting too broad or big,” Romatz says. “A lot of effort went to getting the reflections to look right,” he adds, and to this end, the team did several bright and dark passes. Meanwhile, rough pre-compos-