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Commercials and music videos present unique challenges for visual effects artists. Both time-frames and effects budgets for short-form projects are far more restrictive than what film and TV projects face.

Still, the number of commercials and videos featuring extensive digital effects are growing daily, and the past year saw numerous examples. VisFX highlights five commercials and two recent videos that demonstrate the issues, techniques, and technology involved in creating sophisticated and visually stunning effects for short-form projects.

Digital Ark-itecture

Director Gerard de Thame's elegant Mercedes-Benz commercial, Modern Ark, updates a Biblical classic as a pair of Mercedes E-class cars board a 21^st century Ark.

Mixing and matching multiple motion-control passes from the live-action shoot, CG elements, and still-photo elements proved to be a tricky layering job for Inferno artists Tom Sparks and Rob Moggach at Smoke & Mirrors, London. Complicating matters was the fact that filmmakers shot each element in a separate pass against a dressed and painted cyclorama instead of shooting live elements against green screens.

“We felt we could match things better by using a background that was complimentary, with the same sort of sky and colors and densities of color reflecting off the animals as the actual, finished background,” says Moggach. “All that had to be rotoscoped and then cleaned up extensively, but we had some poor blokes here who took care of that by doing the roto work at night over the course of a couple of weeks.”

But the sheer number of elements and their respective motion-control passes did present Sparks and Moggach with a hefty Inferno challenge.

“The close shots of the animals and items marching up the ramp and into the Ark were tough because of the multiple motion-control passes shot on stage by the director and [DP] Mick Coulter [at Pinewood Studios, London],” says Moggach. “They shot lock-offs of the individual animals, separate passes for each species. They also shot a few passes involving live-action extras, and then there were CG animals, CG crowds in the distance, motion-control shots of the Ark as a miniature, multiple sky elements, and several other things that we had to track together. That made this far from the typical commercial project we usually get, and it took almost three weeks of Inferno work to put it all together.”

Sweeping shots showing the Ark model sitting on a rugged, desert landscape exemplify their unique approach to layering shots. Still photos of desert scenery taken on location in Jordan by photographer Stefan Walter became the basis of panoramic, background effects plates.

“We were able to give those shots a 3D feel by linking them together using [REALVIZ's] Stitcher program,” says Moggach. “That gave us tiles of images, out of which we were able to build a 180-degree view and then go in and isolate portions of that view to create even bigger panoramas. After we stitched them together, I touched them up in Photoshop, and that gave us the panorama effect without having to bring a motion-picture camera to Jordan. Then, we added a few 3D elements, created in Maya, and matched those shots to the multiple camera passes of the scaled model of the Ark.”

The spot also includes a handful of small, digital animals, which Toronto's Calibre Digital Pictures created and then beamed to Smoke & Mirrors using Wam!Net high-speed connection technology.

Liquid Paranoia

In Brain, a new :30 PSA for the Partnership for a Drug Free America, an animated human head sniffing inhalants is suddenly engulfed by a wave of black ink. The wild and unpredictable rush of liquid simulates the paranoia and agitation experienced by drug-inhalant users. Artists at Psyop, New York, refer to this rare form of animation as “liquid control.”

According to Todd Mueller, Psyop creative director and the director of the PSA, the idea was to create a “sort of capillary action, the movement of ink flowing over wet watercolor paper.” Water then rushed through pre-built, clear plastic reservoirs, whose shapes replicated artist Paul Dallas' original print-campaign drawings, disturbing the ink.

Mueller emphasizes that filming the liquid flowing through the reservoirs at 90fps gave filmmakers the organic look they sought. Then, extensive, high-resolution manipulation of those images in post, including the addition of a sepia-tone, allowed artists to push that organic look into the “realm of hallucination.”

“We shot 12 separate frames in-camera, in different shapes, and then we warped the frames in post to create the sense of movement of the water and ink,” says Mueller. “We captured the dynamic sense of liquid motion in-camera and then linked those separate pieces by warping the footage together.”

Psyop's method of manipulating the images was to scan the film at HD resolution, “filming” it in the computer from the perspective of six CG camera angles using Softimage|XSI, and then layering elements together using both Flame and Commotion.

“That let us edit the piece by doing dynamic push-ins and moving the image plane around,” adds Mueller. “By doing it at HD resolution, even though the piece would be broadcast in NTSC, we could manipulate details without losing resolution as the liquid swirled around in an eye or a mouth as the face coughed or sniffed.”

Psyop also spent a great deal of time creating the background surface upon which the animated heads perform. Animators, directed by lead animator Todd Akita, built the paper in CG using Softimage, crafting it to replicate how ink bleeds into paper.

“The piece is meant to be kind of a dirty, organic hallucination,” says Mueller. “Although computers were important in crafting the final animation, there was never any thought given to creating the images in CG. The idea wasn't to make neat CG images, it was to send a warning to teenagers, so we wanted rough, dirty images that portrayed that idea.”

Tools to the Rescue

In Mechanoid, Vice-Grip tools vanquish an evil, mechanical monster, thanks New York's Rhinoceros Visual Effects and Design's extensive efforts to create photo-realistic computer animation. The :30 for Bozell, Omaha, debuts nationally in December.

Executive producer Rick Wagonheim says that while the mechanical monster is obviously CG, the tools featured in the commercial are far from obvious CG creations. They are, he says, the result of a complex collaboration between the agency, Rhinoceros, and director Harry Dorrington.

“The entire commercial is CG,” says Wagonheim, who bid against a stop-motion house by promising completely photo-realistic results. “There was a bit of skepticism at first, but Harry put together a 10-second test film, a shooting board, and that sold the client. It was very much of a feature-film approach. We used 17 people on the job and created 23 layered CG scenes over the course of eight weeks, longer than most commercial cycles.”

Dorrington says that the dark, miniature tale of good versus evil was the most complex commercial created to date by the year-old effects division at Rhinoceros.

“The sophistication of all the CG models and the size of the monster model were very ambitious,” he says, citing complexities of texture, rendering, and lighting. “We constructed the models in Softimage, animated the whole thing in Maya, and made extensive use of Houdini to create particles. The spot has lots of dust and smoke because the idea is to create a dark, comic-book atmosphere. We also used After Effects for compositing and Inferno for color correction. Because some of the scenes were so heavily layered, every shot was extremely dense. We had to design our pipeline and departments much like a feature film to pull it off, with large, but separate, modeling, animation, and compositing teams.”

Dorrington adds that it was necessary to insert imperfections onto the digital tools for a believable effect. The team watched clips of CG feature films, took pictures of rusted metal and scrap heaps, and then spent hours studying the textures and analyzing how light reacts to them.

“The first thing you see is that all materials like that have obvious imperfections, so we worked hard to build those into these characters,” says Dorrington. “The end result is a richness that makes the tools look like the real thing.”

Roommates and Aerosmith

Compositing was the key to putting members of Aerosmith onto a futuristic planet oozing with CG effects for the band's recent music video, Fly Away from Here. Wayne Shepherd, lead compositor at effects' boutique At The Post, Santa Monica, says that artists completed over 170 green-screen shots, as well as extensive rotoscoping and cleanup work, in a razor-thin, three-week timeframe.

“The quantity of green-screen shots, the time-frame, and the fact that the director [Joseph Kahn] kept tweaking the changing environments in the video made this extremely complex from a compositing standpoint,” says Shepherd.

In the beginning of the video, the band performs inside a dark, abstract dome. Close-up shots of lead singer Steven Tyler, shot green screen, left the team with painstaking keys to pull of his wild, bouncing hair.

“We also created lots of lens flares which helped create the effect of pointed lights highlighting the band, and that really helped make the composites look real,” Shepherd notes.

Shepherd and effects supervisor Chris Watts took the unusual step of moving the 3D team, Strange Engine, from its Westchester, Calif. location to At The Post's Santa Monica facility. Having the LightWave team, headed by Bruce Branit and Jeremy Hunt, under the same roof as the Quantel Henry Infinity compositing group proved invaluable.

“We built a seamless pipeline that made everything extremely efficient, networking their 3D renderfarm to our Henrys, accelerated with Digital Voodoo cards,” Shepherd explains. “This approach was perfect because we could keep our overhead low, yet easily network the 3D guys under one roof. Since there were five different, complete environments, we were able to work closely with Strange Engine to build those scenes and their corresponding effects rapidly.”

Articulated Burn

To demonstrate the before-and-after effects of smoking for Living Mural, an anti-smoking PSA, director Harry Karidis and the visual effects team at Ring of Fire, West Hollywood, chose a fine-art approach with a digital twist.

The :30 showcases the work of mural painter Judith Baca. An elaborate Baca painting on a brick wall burns after a smoker tosses his cigarette against the wall and then transitions into a “sad” mural. Since the project's resources hardly gave Baca the months she typically needs to create such a giant mural, the artist let producers combine dozens of her pre-existing pieces into a digitally created, original piece of art.

“We were very lucky that Judy had an extensive library of her stuff already digitized because she likes to design on the computer,” says Jerry Spivack, Ring of Fire's creative director on the project. “She had high-resolution elements already scanned in, and she allowed the director and myself to cut them out and mix them together in Photoshop to build a new mural.”

The PSA's mural begins with what Spivack calls an “A” side, before the actor begins smoking. The “B” side, after he smokes, alters the image radically. Artists handled that portion of the job in Inferno by mixing Maya-created elements with pieces of Baca paintings, as well as original matte paintings created by artist Ron Crabb to mimic Baca's style.

As the mural dissolves from “before” to “after,” Ring of Fire applied a stylized burn effect, as if the cigarette had ignited oil paintings that then burn and peel from their edges.

“For that effect, we shot real fire elements and added some CG elements,” says Spivack. “Then, thanks to some warping and morphing, we were able to replicate that look of oil paint peeling away as it burns.”

This articulated burn effect matched Ring of Fire's overall approach to the PSA's effects.

“The whole point is that this PSA is more stylized than you would find with typical computer animation,” says Spivack. “Because it is supposed to be a piece of art, a mural, reacting to the cigarette, we wanted the imagery to be sort of flat, not breaking fully into that 3D plane. Instead, we approached it with the idea of creating that little illusion of depth. The burn reveals elements and gives them the illusion of animation, without making them full 3D elements.”

Robot Rock

As the metal band Powerman 5000 performs in Bombshell, bombs drop and multi-limbed robots battle on an alien landscape. The group left most of its music video's details to co-directors Greg and Colin Strause, although lead singer Spider did insist on one thing: cool robots.

“Spider is a fan of those old, cheesy film robots from the 1950s,” explains Colin Strause, who also headed up the video's heavy compositing job at his company, Pixel Envy, Santa Monica. “So we designed three-legged robots, with octopus arms and hands coming out of their heads — a lot of appendages for animators to deal with. I did some initial designs, and then one of our modelers, Yoshiya Yamada, built an initial version in a few days. After a few tweaks, we nailed it, and we had a very unique look, in my opinion.”

Pixel Envy artists completed the CG work using Maya 3.0. Strause says it was necessary to add CG set extensions to Vance Lorenzini's practical set in order to crank out the video on a tight schedule.

“The cool thing about having a real set, rather than doing it all green-screen, is that we had ready tracking references, just using points on the real set,” Strause says. “We didn't have to worry about tracking markers, which can be a real pain.”

Easing the pain, according to Strause, was 2d3's automated tracker and Inferno.

“Besides the regular compositing, Inferno also performed extensive color correction in post for us,” he says. “If you watch the video, it's the kind of color work you can't do in a telecine bay — building lots of glows and blurs and heat distortions. One of the sections in the piece has a sort of gold landscape, shimmering with heat distortion. We used all sorts of weird Sparks plug-ins to do stuff like that.”

Beer-Bottle Building

The climactic shot in a recent Michelob Light spot deftly turns a beer bottle into a dominant part of a contemporary city skyline. Artists and director John Adams of Area 51 Films, Santa Monica, wanted the bottle to appear as a glass-sided tower, still under construction, in a busy urban setting. Digital matte painting by Riot, Santa Monica, held the illusion together.

“The skyline behind the bottle is entirely a digital matte painting,” says Michelle Moen, Riot's matte artist. “We added CG elements, such as a crane alongside the bottle, an elevator, and a helicopter, but the buildings were a collage of images I collected from various photographs, and it was the same with the sky. I then layered them all together in Photoshop 5.0.”

Riot 3D animator Sandra Germain built the wireframe for the Michelob Light bottle in Softimage. Moen then composited texture onto the bottle in Adobe After Effects 4.0, so that it would appear realistic from the perspective of a simple, straight-ahead camera move.

“There was talk of using a more complicated camera move, which is why we built a 3D bottle,” notes Moen. “But in the end, the director opted for the straight-ahead move, with the movement of the helicopter, the crane, and the elevators taking care of the illusion of movement. Therefore, the real key to selling the bottle as a gigantic building was the way we textured and lit it.”

Moen's painterly skills came into play as she replicated the look of a real Michelob bottle's brown glass, sparkling in the sun.

“The best solution was to grab textures from real photo references of beer bottles set under the sun,” she explains. “What makes it work is the way we added real-world light flares to the bottle. I just photographed a real bottle in the sun using a consumer digital camera, and then I cut and pasted the flares in Photoshop, stealing them off the digital photos, layering and massaging them in After Effects. It's not a complicated technique, but it requires lots of massaging to layer the light flares onto the glass with the rest of the elements. We ended up with, essentially, a digital matte painting of the bottle itself, even though at its core it's really a 3D bottle. You can do cool things like that using easy-to-find, off-shelf tools like Photoshop and After Effects, and you can make it very convincing.”