Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/977547
e d i t i o n 1 , 2 0 1 8 | c g w 2 5 "Dilly Dilly" became the battle cry of sorts in a comical Super Bowl commercial for Bud Light that employs digital effects. Part of Bud Light's "Dilly Dilly" campaign, the commercial, titled "The Bud Knight," har- kens back to medieval times, as a dispassion- ate king watches from afar as his subjects engage in hand-to-hand combat against a much stronger and better-equipped oppo- nent armed with broadswords, bows, and shields on a smoke-filled field of battle. With defeat on the horizon, clouds part and the Bud Knight appears, giving hope to the losing townspeople. Crowds part as the knight passes by on horseback … and then enters a convenience store "cabin" on the top of the hill. As the knight departs, with a case of Bud Light under his arm, a soldier asks if he is going to fight with them, to which he replies: "Oh, ah, a buddy of mine is having this 30th birthday thing. If you sur- vive, come by." The soldier responds, "Yeah, that is probably not going to happen." Feel- ing sorry for the group, the knight dismounts and raises his sword in the air, releasing a shock wave across the battlefield. The commercial was filmed in PioPio, New Zealand, and almost every shot was digitally touched by the team from The Mill in New York, which did crowd replications, cloud Medieval Times made "from the ground up out of Nuke." As with most projects, the team faced a few challenges in completing the spot. The characters were each hand modeled. "The tough part is that they want these to feel like metal, and feel like real sensibilities of how you would handcra these things," says McDougal. "They wanted them all to be a little bit different, so it felt like different artisans were touching on these because most trophies are designed in an individ- ualistic way. None of them match, but the general idea is that each trophy matches." As McDougal notes, it's not so much that each of the individual pieces are particularly difficult to make, because they are known materials and things that we've all seen and know what they should look like. Rather, it was the sheer scale that was probably the toughest part and figuring out smart ways to populate this huge trophy city and make it actually through about 60-odd individually animated char- acters. "Not only building them," he adds, "but animating them and figuring out what that animation was supposed to look like – those were the real challenges." According to McDougal, the studio is typically creating creatures and other ele- ments that are integrated into live-action plates. "Once in a while, though, we get fully CG things and get to do very heavy character work. When that happens, we can do it very well, like I think our team did here. It opens up other possibilities for different work," he says. "In this spot, our directors, the agency, and even the client weren't making huge demands on us. They were saying, 'You have the framework, we'll just keep editing as we go along, but you guys are doing a really nice job. Just keep pushing it further.' " – Linda Romanello