E*Trade Art Installation

The Challenge:  Create a giant art installation involving hundreds of seemingly random elements and optical illusions that will look like a perfect seamless image from a specific angle.  To make the challenge even more difficult, that same art installation has to look like a completely different image when viewed from a different angle.  Oh, and it all has to be done practically in camera.  No CGI or VFX trickery.  Oh, and they would like 2 of these installations.

oh boy...

This was probably the most difficult project I've ever worked on in my 20+ year career.  Designing one massive optical illusion is difficult enough, but multiple ones all working together?  Making it work from 2 different angles?  All done practically?  And they would need two of them?  Needless to say we spent a lot of time in the computer building the installation virtually so that we could experiment with different designs and optical trickery to make the illusion work, first in the computer, and then in real life.

Since this effect had never been done before we really couldn't look to other works for clues as to how to pull this off.  We had to discover the solutions for ourselves.  The most important being the requirement of working through 2 virtual cameras simultaneously.  Any change to an illusion in one camera would most likely affect an illusion in the other camera so we had to be very careful about how we positioned every single element.  All the while keeping in mind that this all needed to be able to be actually built.  It all had to be possible.

In the end we were able to provide the production designer with accurate models and measurements of all the elements, prints, and other illusions so that his talented team could fabricate everything down to the fraction of an inch.  We spent two weeks building both art installations in a vast industrial warehouse south of downtown Los Angeles.   Just under two months of preparation in total for a single motion control take per spot.  A remarkable and utterly exhausting achievement.  The result, however, was totally worth it.   A pair of commercials that are both mind bending and totally unique.

Agency:  R/GA
Client:  ETrade
SVP Executive Creative Director:  Jay Zasa
Group Executive Creative Director:  Paul Dery
Creative Director:  Marie Ronn
Managing Director:  Michael Stoopack
Creative Director:  Erik Tell
Executive Production Director:  Kat Friis
Executive Producer, Campaigns:  Jeff Skutnik
Account Supervisor:  James Hogan
Producer, Campagins:  Lucas Dennison
Senior Content Producer:  Chris Ott
Production Company:  Brand New School
Director:  Jonathan Notaro
Managing Partner:  Devin Brook
VFX Supervisor/Lead Flame:  Mark French
VFX Supervisor/Lead Flame:  Bryant Reif
Flame Artist:  Kirk Balden
Flame Artist:  Greg Cutler
Art Director:  Jeffery Welk
Art Director:  Andres Rivera
Art Director:  Jordan Lyle
Technical Director:  Dan Bradham
Modeler:  Scott Denton
Concept Artist:  Carlos Ancalmo

What is This? A Set for Ants?

One of the regrettable casualties of the digital revolution in visual effects was the of decline of the use of miniatures.  But every once in a while a project comes around that practically demands the use of miniatures and the lost art is revived.  

It is just so impressive to see the tiny, intricate and completely realistic details that the artists and technicians are able to put into their work.  And there is an authenticity in the natural imperfections that come with working with things that are "real" as opposed to the mathematical perfection that computers are so good at replicating.  So it was a joy to work with the talented crew that was assembled for these holiday Honda spots.

In these spots the creative called for live action footage of actors and vehicles composited into a series of miniatures sets.    There was a lot to figure out and plan for in advance to make sure that, not only could we shoot everything we needed in a very tight 9 day shoot schedule,  but that the scale and angle of the shots would be able to be seamlessly merged later on in post production.    Obviously previs was an important first step in this process and we frequently referenced it while on set shooting.

9 miniature sets
24 hero trees
200 small trees and bushes
600 lbs of baking soda "snow"
2000+ really small Christmas lights
1 miniature motorized ski lift

UPDATE:
Honda came back for another round in 2016.  What a great campaign.

E3 2014

Activision Publishing, Inc. - Experiential E3 2014

This year I worked with Ant Farm as Visual Effects Supervisor to help produce a 10 min immersive experiential for Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare for the Activision booth at E3.  The final presentation used 12 projectors pointed inward at a massive 20ft curved screen to create a 10k horizontal resolution image with a 220 degree field of view.

You can watch the massive stage being built in this time lapse video...

The biggest challenge with this job was to process the massive amounts of data being generated by the game capture team.  In all, over 30 terabytes of game footage was captured at Ultra HD resolution (3240x2160) to be blended together into a seamless "ShowMode" resolution (9990x1804) image sequence.  This obviously required some automation.  For this I used The Foundry's Nuke as the base package for compositing all the images together.  Within Nuke I added quite a bit of python code and TCL expressions to automate the data ingestion, geometric distortion (cylindrical projection), seem blending, and finally, output to all the various resolutions and formats required for internal screening and delivery to vendors.

The final result was mind blowing.  Combined with lighting effects, powerful rumblers under the floor, and synchronized wind gusts, the experience was truly immersive.

Behind The Scenes: Motel 6 “Metamorphosis”

I was brought in to King and Country, a small production and motion graphics house, in 2010 as their Visual Effects Supervisor. The goal was to build a visual effects department that would help take the company, and the scope of work, to the next level. I had been there nearly 2 years when the storyboards for this job were placed in front of me. This was the “next level” type of project we had been building up for. It was certainly the most ambitious VFX job that King and Country had taken on up to that point. 5 photo-real CG cars, each one modeled then broken up and rigged in order to have them transform. Photo-real interiors for each car that also needed to be modeled, chopped up, and rigged. Luggage, cameras, video games, clothes, glasses, facial hair, etc all need to be built as virtually every person and ever item in this commercial morphs from one iconic era to the next.

Behind the scenes footage and VFX montage.   © King and Country

To achieve the effect of traveling through 50 years of time in just 30 seconds a tremendous amount of planning went into this spot long before anything was filmed. We worked closely with the make-up and wardrobe departments, as well as the art department, to not only coordinate all the different styles and accessories for each era in time but to help facilitate the digital transitions that would come later. A team of artists worked on mapping out the entire commercial in previs so that we could sit down with the director and 1st AD to plan out each gag in every shot which amounted to well over 100 transitions in total. We took this previs and shot breakdown with us to the shooting location and it proved an invaluable reference when setting up each shot under an extremely tight shooting schedule.

One we had our live action footage the real fun began. We used Autodesk Maya to model, surface, and animate each of the 5 fully digital cars used in the commercial, one for each decade beginning in the 1950s. Maya was also used to model and animate all the car interiors, clothing, toys and accessories that transformed in the spot. One of the first things I did when I was building the new VFX pipeline at King and Country was to add Chaos Group's Vray to the rendering pipeline and it paid off beautifully on this spot. We were able to take the HDR images I compiled from the shoot locations and with minimal adjustments exactly duplicate the lighting environment present that day on set. Along with careful shading work using the new car shader nodes in Vray the result was a seamless transition from real car to digital car and vice-versa.

Documentary on the making of Motel 6 “Metamorphosis”.    © The Richards Group

It was pretty amazing what we were able to pull off with a relatively small crew and with the modest resources available to us at King and Country. It was at sometimes hectic and sometimes frustrating but in the end a very rewarding project to work on.

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Credits

Project Title: Motel 6 “Metamorphasis”
Running Time: :30
Debut Date: 04/09/12
Client: Motel 6

Branding Agency: The Richards Group
Brand Creative Group Head/Writer: Chris Smith
Brand Creative/Art Director: Peter Everitt
Producer: Sheri Cartwright

Production Company: King and Country
Director: Rick Gledhill
Executive Producer: Jerry Torgerson
Line Producer: Gary Kout
Post Producer: Paul Winze
Director of Photography: Jordan Valenti

Editorial, Animation, VFX: King and Country
Editor: Andrew Maggio
Art Director: Jon Lorenz
VFX Supervisor: Bryant Reif

Designers:
Rick Gledhill
Mike Goubeaux
Gabriella Russo
Pietro Desopo
Tom Kenney
Greg Mitchell
Dan Hamilton

Previsualization:
Billy Maloney
Hugo Codinach
Jon Lorenz
Mike Johnson
Bryant Reif

3D Artists:
Kyung Park
Mike Johnson
Andrew Cook
Billy Maloney
Andrew Parris
Chris Kelley
Greg Mitchell
Adam Swaab
Tim Salikov

Compositing Artists:
Jon Lorenz
Rick Gledhill
Tom Kenney
Chris Kelley
Adam Swaab

Telecine Company: New Hat
Colorist: Bob Festa

Sound Effects Company: Lime Studios
Audio Mixer: Loren Silber

Launch Of New Website

Today my new website is launched.  Part of the launch is this blog where I hope to share tips, tricks and a peek behind the scenes of some of the commercials I work on.  Enjoy!