My last NZ-based shoot. These were a series of commercials. We shot in around Christchurch in many different locations for several days. Rob McLaughlin was director, and Warwick Wrigley the DOP. This was a great experience working with this crew.
In this project I was primarily the on-set visual effects supervisor. Back in the studio, however, I had really nothing much to contribute as the post-production crew had already been slated. I had been assigned to work on Toyko Ghoul following the conclusion of the shooting.
The original project had already been completed by the time I got called in; it was for a ‘redux’ version of the ad. In this version, I simmed rocks rolling along the surface of the monoliths (in LW), and helped fix and set up the Maya scenes for render.
I worked on this with Dominic Taylor who had set up the comps, cameras, and worked with the clients on the direction. I mainly did the flipboard effect.
This was quite a challenging and difficult effect to do in Maya. The main driver of the rotations was expressions; the expression were taking their values from samples from textures, which were generated from AE. The main difficulty lay in the fact that it was slow, and it needed to be baked out before it could be sent to the farm because setAttr was the mandatory method of applying the motions.
The flipboard effect was not only flipping from image A to image B; in fact, it goes through a series of photographs before it resolves into the final, and designing the mechanics of the scene took some tries before getting right.
In retrospect, LW’s nodal displacement in conjunction with Denis Pontonnier’s Part Move nodes is a superior method. Where it took me about week to get all the shots set up in Maya, I think I would have done the same in LW for less than half the time.
This was a crazy one, though a bit hard to explain how. If you find that above commercial is somewhat stylistically schizophrenic, then that goes some way in not having to explain a whole lot more. Like many of the works I do, it’s hard to claim substantial ownership, hence the sometimes-lengthy commentary.
I contributed a few sequences to this ad: the hacker-chess-armour-snow globe sequence that starts with Julian Stokoe‘s illustration of the hacker with a computer I put in there. I also did the pinball animation sequence before that.
Another good reason to break down some of my works is that I, myself, take my own work for granted. Before I reviewed the clip, I recalled that the pinball animation was my only contribution. Sure, this reflects the hectic day-to-day work, and my pathetic memory, but it underlines the need to give credit where it is due; less about outward or social recognition, but a true appreciation of what tends to be forgotten or ignored, even by me.
The cg aspect to this — falling blueberries on yoghurt in a pot — was another solo job for me. The final comp was a Flame job, though I always try to get 3d renders as close to the actual colours as possible.
There was no pre-production for me as this was just given to me all of a sudden; I would have liked to have gotten lighting information in the set and reference plates. Basically, what we had — not a whole lot — was all that I could work on. Thankfully, there was a close-up shot of the pot as part of the edit, which I used as projected texture back to my cg pot model. This allowed me to get graded colours directly onto the 3d render.
The viscous yoghurt fluid sim was done in Realflow, and rendered in V-Ray because the sub-surface shading there was very easy to get. But the rest of the elements were rendered in LightWave where I could get the most control over how colours were being rendered. This was important because I had also taken a piece of reference footage which showed how the pot looked like under a lighting condition similar to that of the cut. LightWave’s nodal shading system made it easier for me to control the shading of local areas.
I rarely get solo projects, and when I do, it’s often some retail job that either involve the simplest form of motion graphics that a 10-year old could do, or some CG-ish product shot that covers the same old ground that I’ve been treading on for 13 years now.
Well, although, this ad is of the second form (CG-ish product), the fact that it is a solo project is something that always fills me with delight, as I feel freest when I work alone as I move into the pace that suits me best.
For a product ad, for what it is, I think the ad is visually ok. Obviously, it breaks no barriers, but I had fun doing it. I learned a bit more about LightWave’s instancing, added some features and fixed bugs in Janus; it was relaxing to do something on my own, based on my own tastes.
This is one of those many commercials that I do that best serve as an example of why I started to post these works up. I’ll explain. This commercial is Mother Earth – Pingos, and if we go by the usual way we credit these sorts of works in the commercials industry, I would be considered as having nothing to do with the project whatsoever. The animatic was done by the animation director, and from there everything else was was done by Terry. The main character was primarily animated by Paul working as a contractor. Terry set up, lit, shaded, and rendered all this in V-Ray, and then comped it up as well.
My part was a thing called Sandline, our budding shot/cache automation system, which has grown much since then. It wasn’t me who operated it, however; it was just me who’s developing it. Sandline is one of those things that helped Terry along the way; conversely, Terry helped refine Sandline as well by spotting workflow issues as it related to this job.
Oh, I lied; I just remembered I did actually do something in the ad: I did the cool looking ribbon logo animation at the end. There! Can I have my award now?
My contribution to this ad is typical of my usual: bits and pieces everywhere, not claiming to a whole lot, and yet stuck on to it like bees in a hive (funny metaphor methinks).
I took HDRs during the shoot and assisted in the vfx supervision. Meanwhile, back in the studio, to the advice of Will Brand, we had laser-scanned reference shells and Terry was busy cleaning them up. Afterwards, I rigged the crab as other work continued on it.
I tracked and set-up most (if not all — can’t really remember) the shots, including the base lighting found in the HDRs. I had only one scene on my name, but, inevitably, at the tail-end of the commercial, when the producer started ending the contractors’ terms, Terry and I were left to fix up the needed bits for the Flame op.
That sort of arrangement is often the case with jobs that require a number of people; as the quasi-core group, a lot of the heavy lifting goes to the contractors who are hired especially for that; when the bulk of the work is done, whatever other technical issues that require sorting often comes down to us, because by that time, the producer has decided it’s costing too much to have contractors hang on (oftentimes I think the reason is that the producer has hired too many guns to begin with). And that’s why it sometimes feels like we’re clean-up men.
I should say this is a “bit of an odd one”, but then I would sound like broken track record, wouldn’t I?
Yes, it’s another odd one, internally called JAWS, it was abandoned like a mutant, tossed like a hot potato into the hands of the poor soul who needed to resurrect this dying pig… or sheep.
Fortunately, I was not the poor soul, but Richard Falla. Pitying his sorry life dearly, I extended a finger — my pinky, to be precise — to assist his writhing body out of the the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.
So I made racist kiwifruit drop from the sky and flags wave. Cool. In the meantime, Richard rescued the job from burning in hell.
This was another sub-contract from Australian vfx vendor. My contribution here was the extension of the trees at the beginning of the ad, which featured apples (real apples either weren’t on season at the time, or that they were apple trees to begin with). We bought some stock trees, I populated them with apples, shaded, lit, rendered in LightWave, and integrated them into the foreground and background areas of the matchmoved footage.
The trickiest bit, actually, was the Australian vfx company. They operated in Nuke, and required lensing data to be piped back to our renders. But while they knew their own process — which involved UV remapping, I hadn’t done it to other vendor’s specs before during post-production, but it turned out all right in the end, as it usually does.
