Commercials 30
nike write the future The epic Nike Write the Futurespot, from W + K Amsterdam and directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu, relies heavily on The Mill’s vfx work. In the summer of 2009, The Mill geared up for potential World Cup work by building a cg version of the World Cup stadium in South Africa. It then approached agencies about World Cup related projects and soon landed this monster spot. The ad required a 23 day shoot, 250 vfx shots, 130 massive crowd shots, five weeks of post, a feature film sized crew, and a team of 50 staff at The Mill working across its London, New York and LA offices.
weetabix happy breakfast
Stink’s humourous Weetabix spot for WCRS, directed by Ben Dawkins, centres on three talking household pets lip sync-ed and animated by a team at Glassworks. Lead Flame artist and visual effects supervisor on the spot, Duncan Malcolm, says the vfx house was approached by Dawkins before he’d even won the job, to talk through potential ways to create a naturalistic effect for the talking animals. “We work with Ben a lot, and even before he got the spot, he came to us to talk about techniques,” says Malcolm. “He didn’t want the integration to look lumpy – the biggest worry was it wouldn’t look real.”
Once Dawkins was given the green light, Glassworks’ 3d artist Vaclav Cikovsky was invited to the animal casting session, so he had the heads up on the look of each of the animals: “It was an important decision from a vfx point of view for details such as the length of the hair,” says Malcolm. “Vaclav photographed the animals and kind of insisted they nailed the casting at that stage and didn’t change their minds.”
Each of the animals was animated in a similar way, says Malcolm. “You start by building the shape of the face, using the photos. All animals had their faces rebuilt as geometry, and the mouth is reanimated by re-projecting it onto the face,” he says.
To avoid losing the bristling and feel of the mouth, “you have to apply cg hair over the face and re-project that too.” And additional work was done on the cat’s whiskers. “We had to remove its whiskers and put them back on as the way the cat curled its lips has an impact on the way they move,” explains Malcolm.
The final challenge was getting the look inside the mouth right. “Re-projecting doesn’t give you the inside of the mouth and the teeth so we had to re-build that in cg and light it correctly,” says Malcolm. “It has to be lit differently to the front of the face – it was a tiny detail but not without its challenges.”
November 10 I
www.televisual.com 33
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