Multimedia
Blogs
Forum
Affordable HD
Whitepapers
Newsletters
Events
Advertisers
Blogcast
MillimeterRunning With The Squirrels
Mar 1, 2001 12:00 PM, by Ellen Wolff
During the past two Super Bowl broadcasts, television commercials for the data processing company EDS have taken humorous twists. Last year's spot featured cowboys engaged in the ludicrous job of herding cats, and this year, ad agency Fallon McElligot/Minneapolis came up with an ironic twist on Spain's “running with the bulls” event. The resulting :60 shows a crowd of grown men running through winding cobblestone streets with a pack of squirrels in hot pursuit.
For last year's spot, Venice, California-based Sight Effects primarily used real felines to generate the “cat herd.” This year, the studio quickly discerned that wrangling dozens of squirrels would be impossible. “Because of the problems involved in shooting multiple squirrels together, we decided to primarily create the squirrels in CGI,” says visual effects supervisor Melissa Davies.
For shots with close-ups of “hero” squirrels, however, Sight Effects did blend CG animation with bluescreen photography of real animals. “Our approach was always to go as photoreal as possible,” explains Davies. For instance, for one panning shot that shows a squirrel jumping on a bench and running toward the camera, Sight Effects used a CG squirrel for the portion before the bench and “the real thing” for the segment after.
Director John O'Hagan's completely hand-held camera style made such precise integration difficult. While the shooting style gave footage of the running men a “documentary” type of feeling, it made it more difficult for Sight Effects to track the camera movement later, when adding the squirrels.
During plate photography, the effects crew gathered data on the lenses used and the height of each camera from the ground, which was no small task. “We did have five cameras out there, shooting 600 extras,” Davies notes.
Back in the studio, the team picked the plate shots into which artists would later add the squirrels. While tracking is often done with software, that option was not practical for the spot's hand-held photography. “Tracking software doesn't usually work for something so jittery,” notes animator Michael Capton. “The camera movement in this spot is pretty much all hand-tracked in Inferno.”
Sight Effects also had to shoot the bluescreen footage of the real animals that would be featured in close-ups. For the “bench shot,” Davies says the crew filmed squirrels as they jumped onto a platform. “We had about eight animals on set, and we shot squirrel after squirrel after squirrel,” she notes. “In the main, they cooperated. The hardest part was simulating the camera move from our plate shot. We used the same camera lens and shot from the approximate camera height so that we could get the right perspective, and we eye-matched it to the background plate that was selected.”
This footage of actual squirrels then set the standards that the CG artists would match. “We got a lot of references,” Capton recalls, “even the blue-screen filming was helpful in showing us how the squirrels behaved.” Animators built the CG models from scratch using Maya, creating a skeletal model, a model for all of the joints and muscle groups, and a model that included the claws.
To help create dozens of squirrels, Capton wrote procedural code that set parameters for the animals' range of motions. “There's so much that goes on with four-legged creatures,” he notes. “This software dealt with the basic animation of the squirrels and allowed us to focus more on how they're running and not worry about the nuances of how the claws on their feet are opening and closing and what their tails are doing.”
While CG offers the tempting option of duplicating models, Capton says if he had duplicated just one or two of the squirrels, it would have looked too obvious. “I think that's something you can only do if you have thousands of creatures,” Capton says, “So we didn't just do one and duplicate it 30 times. That technique did help us in the beginning stages when we were just getting them all running in the same direction, but after that we pretty much customized each squirrel.”
“They really were all individuals,” observes Davies. “We did variations on their tails and the thickness of their hair to make some of them look a little fatter than others, so they looked more varied. Maya's procedures for generating fur definitely helped us a lot.”
Animators also had to make the fleet-footed creatures run convincingly down the cobblestone street — and not just skim the surface. “That was a primary concern,” notes Capton, “so we wrote some software to make sure that their feet hit the ground at certain points.”
Another key factor in making these digital squirrels appear real involved the play of shadows and light. “The shadows of the people who were running in the scenes were very soft,” says Capton. “We tried to do simple contact shadows for the squirrels but it just didn't work so we had to write a bit of scripting to deal with that. As the squirrels get closer to the ground you can see that the shadows get more dense.”
Artists created and rendered all of the shot's digital elements (including digital confetti) in Maya, running on both SGI and Windows NT machines and composited these elements with the plate photography in Inferno.
Looking back, Davies notes that the complexity of this spot expanded as the job proceeded. “As people saw that we could make the squirrels do anything in CG, it just got more and more outrageous. Rendering this job took every one of the Onyx machines we have!”
Credit Roll
Director: John O'Hagan, Hungry Man Productions
For Sight Effects:
Visual Effects Supervisor: Melissa Davies. Producer: Andrea Morland. CGI Animators: Michael Capton, Kim Dail, Dariush Derakhshani, Ernie Rinard, Michael Teperson, Chris Wells. Compositors: Michelle Steinau, Christine Goldby, Scott Polen.
For Fallon McElligot:
Producer: Marty Wetherall
Art Director: Dean Hanson
Writer: Greg Hahn
Continue the discussion on “Crosstalk” the Millimeter Forum.