Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/8034
n n n n Broadcast MR. WARMTH • TELEFLORA Director: Tim Hamilton Agency: Fire Station Production company: Go Films CG company: Asylum Just in time for Super Bowl—and Valen- tine’s Day—Teleflora brought back its talking flowers in a story of comeuppance and com- edy. A vain office worker, who snubs a timid colleague, is supremely self-satisfied to receive a box of flowers. But when she opens the box, she finds a mouthy, wilted tulip—voiced by none other than comedian Don Rickles—that berates the sender as well as the receiver. As the horrified woman slams shuts the box, the mousy co-worker receives a beautiful bouquet of Teleflora flowers in a vase, presented per- sonally by a Teleflora deliveryman. Asylum created its first talking flower for And that’s not always an easy thing.” Not all the flowers are digital, however. A florist and the art department put to- gether a practical bouquet using real dead flowers. “Te bulk of the bouquet is practi- cal,” Warner says. Two sticks in the bouquet served as tracking markers, and the digital team used Andersson Technologies’ SynthEyes to track the practical flowers, so the com- positors could drop the digital flowers right on top of the bundle. Te four digital tulips were modeled and rigged in Autodesk’s Maya, with textures painted in Adobe’s Photoshop and Right Hemisphere’s Deep Paint. Te color palette matched some of the existing flowers in the practical bouquet, although the crew had to fight the temptation to make the CG flowers more beautiful. FIDDLING BEAVER • MONSTER.COM Director: Tom Kuntz Agency: BBDO Production company: MJZ CG company: Framestore In November, BBDO creative director/ writer Steve McElligott and creative direc- tor/art director Jerome Marucci approached producer Anthony Curti with the concept of a fiddling beaver for a Monster.com com- mercial. Tey made two decisions: Te beaver would be animatronic, and they would return to Framestore—where they had gone for two previous Super Bowl commercials—for all the CG creation and compositing. “We wanted it to be realistic, to show a busy-beaver lifestyle and how this one beaver (an animatronic from AnimatedFX in Los Angeles) was an outcast,” says Curti. Te spot Asylum modeled and then inserted four computer-generated tulips into a bouquet of real (albeit wilted) flowers. The artists then tweaked the color and location of the real and fake flowers. Teleflora a year and a half ago to start off the campaign. For Super Bowl Sunday, there was pressure to come up with something that would up the ante. “And they did that with voice talent Don Rickles,” says Asylum execu- tive producer Mike Pardee. “We also needed to up the ante with the look, by updating the textures, colors, and feel of the petals, not just to match the bouquet better, but also to make it feel more real.” Te spot was shot first with a stand-in voice talent, with the VFX team in attendance, to ensure that enough space was left inside the flower box to insert the CG flora during post. “We worked with the director to make sure the framing was right, so when we have the digital flowers in the bouquet, they’d have enough room to breathe and act,” says lead animator/CG supervisor Mike Warner. Te digital tulip that was the hero flower rises upward farther than the other flowers. “We pushed the drama of filling the frame further this time, so the flower could be more [theatrical],” says Warner. “In working with the actors, we find an eye line that will work for the director and also makes sense for us. 28 March 2010 “In this case, we want them to look dead and ugly,” says 3D lead Jeff Werner. “Tere was an ugly red flower in the practical bouquet that we changed more to a brown, so our main hero tulip, which is red, could stand out.” Te animation was a process of iteration. “Te danger of going too cartoony is that you want to avoid a lot of Warner Bros.-style squash and stretch,” says Werner. “Our part was to match that dialog just right so it felt like the flower was saying the dialog, and give it that little emotion to turn the flower into an actor. Between head motion and exaggerating the dialog with mouth motions, you get a lot more personality out of it.” Asylum used Te Foundry’s Nuke for pre- compositing, with the final composite work done in Autodesk’s Flame. Rendering, mean- while, was done within Pixar’s RenderMan. Lighting artist Eric Pender also did pre-comps to set up the lighting, generating passes and mattes so the client could adjust the colors and tones in the final composite. “Tat’s key, to let the client have all that flexibility in the end,” says Pardee. “Also, having a voice like Don Rickles was fun.” called for an entire beaver world that had to be constructed quickly, so the group lost no time in contacting the VFX studio. Despite the quick contact, Framestore would have less than two and a half weeks to complete the work. At the time the project started, there wasn’t a storyboard yet, says Framestore animation supervisor Kevin Rooney. “All we knew was there was a hero beaver playing the fiddle and there would be background beavers,” he says. With time ticking away, the Framestore team immediately began creating a generic CG beaver model to get the process moving. When the modelers received some photos of the animatronic from the shoot, they began to shape their creatures—which would appear in the background shots—to be more in tune with the look of the mechanical star. “What we didn’t know was how far the beavers would be away from camera, and if they’d be swim- ming or on dry land,” says CG supervisor Jenny Bichsel. Next up was creating different fur grooms and various animation cycles for the CG animals. “We rigged our beaver models to do anything that might be asked of them,” says Rooney. “We didn’t spend much time setting up the faces because we knew there wouldn’t be much in terms of lip synching. [Rather], we