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MillimeterStitched Together
Jun 9, 2010 12:00 PM, By Nathan McGuinness, founder/director, Kommitted Films
A smooth ride through three continents.
As the founder and live-action director at Kommitted Films, I was happy to continue my productive relationship with the Kaplan Thaler Group and Continental Airlines with Seamless, a :30 journey through New York, London, Shanghai, Buenos Aires, and Paris.
The new work for Continental has been sleek and well-designed, connecting planes with the high production values often associated with car spots. The brief for Seamless was a challenging development.
How do you walk a man through five cities in 14 seconds without taking your eyes off him? The current climate and budgetary constraints rule out a world tour shooting all the locations or an elaborate CG solution. And we only had three days in Buenos Aires.
In a word, the answer is preparation.
It sounds nasty, something an incredibly irritating science teacher might say, but it is a maddening truism that doing your homework pays. While researching the possible locations, wardrobes, set dressings, and more, the whole spot was previsualized in Autodesk Maya. The animation looks fairly basic, but it allows the spot to be paced out, lenses and variations of camera moves tried and refined. This helps to troubleshoot, hone the vision, and communicate to everyone what’s required.
What is required here is motion control. The MRMC Milo is a remarkable beast. At 7ft. tall, it often appears sentient running along up to 100ft. of track, performing powerful pirouettes to keep the movement of the camera head subtle and above all repeatable. The move prevized is a floaty track, following our traveler on a 27mm lens, wide enough to take in and read each location. Then we went down to Argentina for some serious scouting.
At least two locations needed to be shot on the same day, and the setup times meant that a good site survey of each place was essential. Once the locations were narrowed down, measured and extensively photographed, the images were uploaded to Microsoft Photosynth and the measurements sent to the pre-viz artist. Photosynth is a website that meshes image sets together to create a 3D scene. The scenes are based on a point cloud derived from the focal point of each picture. You can see spatial relationships and zoom though the images, which dynamically change resolutions. Using these scenes, the previz took a new direction, this time using location stills projected into more accurate virtual environments. Google Earth provided information about the light direction at different times of day.
Continue the discussion on “Crosstalk” the Millimeter Forum.