I consider myself a competent but frustrated character animator. I say frustrated on account of people’s bias of me as a technical person, I’ve too often been asked, instead, to rig characters. In this case, the characters of this commercial were completely in 2D, illustrated by Gareth Jensen, who also did a lot of the animation along with a few other animators.
The main difference was that the job was going to be done completely in After Effects, including the rigging. I’m not an AE rigger, nor have I animated a character in AE before. While I’ve seen what mind-boggling AE rigging tools can do, at the time of this commercial, I hadn’t seen any of them yet. So I basically had to do everything from scratch: learn Puppet Tools, create the workflow for swapping assets, expressions to switch drawings, etc.
Frankly, I don’t know if I want to do that again, given the powerful rigging tools available today. I think I’d prefer to animate.
This was a sub-contract from an Australian vfx vendor. Terry, with an assistant intern (which was more trouble than help), built rickety structures on the bridge and gave it an gloomy look. My main contribution to this was the front-on car shot on the bridge; I tracked the shot in PFTrack, though it couldn’t completely solve it; I had to hand-track to start of the shot. I modelled and shaded broken old wood that the car was driving on, lit and rendered layers in LightWave using Janus, and test-comped it before sending it to OZ.
I admit that it’s nice to have been involved with an ad that simply looks nice, even though I had absolutely no control or even input on how the other scenes — and the ad as a whole — was going to look like. Implicitly taking credit for being associated with the ad’s look is as easy as simply letting others naturally assume it. Let that not be the case here.
I worked on this as a freelancer, and it was quite a frantic job. There were so many elements and if a cg forensic psychologist would examine the Maya scenes, they would find that loads of textual clues of how stressful this commercial was.
For all its unbearably fast pace editing and doubtful composition choices, the final renders didn’t look half-bad at all. Of course, I must say that I didn’t contribute to the rendering. :)
My contribution, in fact, was, again, the rigging of the characters; they were actually flat characters (to depict a 2d look), and I rigged them accordingly, which was a crazy thing, actually. I didn’t have a say in the matter, of course. The red bear protagonist was only partly 2d: he had some thickness.
I got a chance to animate some of the characters, like the villainous evil purple guy and the spectators on the stand. But, once again, in the spirit of this thread, to make known what is normally hidden away from the those who view this, my contribution extended far beyond what was nominally given to me. For most of the time, character animation (not limited to this job, of course) had been revised by me, though I couldn’t take credit for it officially because I hadn’t originally been assigned to do it, nor could say it had been mine unless I nixed the original completely, which hardly ever happens. It happens not only in animation, but in every aspect of the job: shading, modelling, rendering, setup, rigging, and even compositing.
Perhaps that’s why it feels much bigger in my mind than what the credits say: to have personally struggled against a stubborn scene that was placed on my lap, and thus produce the grain that otherwise wouldn’t have been produced, impresses upon me the importance of looking beyond the obvious.
This commercial was a straightforward integration piece. Done back in May 2013, I had flown to Sydney for this job with Leoni Willis, who was the primary on-set supervisor. I came as a supervisor for the cg team, and mainly took HDRs of the scene lighting. There aren’t always that many cases in my experience that requires exacting HDRs — many lighting situations can be faked simply by observing the scene — but in this one, especially the indoor/semi-outdoor scenes, the HDR reflection maps were very effective.
We had shot throughout whole days, and one of the worries I had was changing light conditions. So I took HDRs at regular intervals (2-4 hours apart), depending on whether the direct sun was affecting the intended subject area, and whether or not the ambient had changed drastically, as it does when cloud cover comes and goes. Shooting in this way was much better for the production crews as well, as I only did them when they were well within between takes and they didn’t bothered. I kept track of the time that scene and takes were taken on the production book. Back at the studio, I organised the HDR sets by their timestamps; I matched that with the final offline correlated to the production book notes.
Besides the set work, I contributed the lighting of many of the scenes, though the shading was mainly developed by the Terry Nghe. I’m usually responsible for both the start and end parts of the job, which means scene setup/layout, and then rendering/managing outputs, fixing odd, tail-end issues, and this job was no exception. Will Brand worked on the mouth rig with me as well as worked up some scenes himself. I worked on the rig fro the rest of the, while Alfredo Luzardo, did most of the animation, though we also got a few others to fill gaps. Leoni did the job of compositing all of our renders.
For all its simplicity and straightforwardness, I really like this commercial because its simplicity looks good, it’s believable, and doesn’t take itself too seriously. To add, I liked the team I was working with.
I normally don’t post the commercial work I do, and my reason for doing starting to do this now correlates to slowing down and appreciating just what the heck I’m doing.
I taught at a vfx/animation school once, and in that setting, I found it hard to quantify the things I did. I get through one year of multifarious subjects, a year of events, grading, failing, meeting, etc. It’s one big blur, and my memory being less-than-stellar, I’d forget all the details. Then one night, my wife and I started talking about the feeling of under-achieving despite feeling so busy. So we sat down to write our achievements, reminding each other what we had done.
I go through many projects, and I start one before stopping another, and so I’m not in the habit of sitting down and appreciating the end of projects. At the end of the year, it’s sometimes quite amazing to the see just how many I go through.
This commercial linked above, dubbed internally as Sporty Drive, was a 3-part campaign, and I was only involved in the first commercial. Three vfx houses contributed to the first commercial; two from NZ, and the main vfx vendor from Japan called VisualMan. It was shot in Queenstown, NZ with a Japanese crew and a local NZ crew. I was there along with two other vfx supervisors from the vendors to vfx-supervise the shoot It was a great time; I hadn’t been to Queenstown before and the only thing that marred my work was the fact that I hadn’t been sleeping well (one night I didn’t sleep at all).
At the set of the airplane-forest shot; DOP at the top of the truck.
I would characterise the shoot as hectic as there were multiple locations that were hours apart, and we had only 3 days to shoot them all. Thankfully, I didn’t need to be in all of those locations and planned accordingly. vfx meetings were held late at night to discuss the storyboard; the director of the ad was not present, and only the DOP was the one heading the shoot.
The post-production side took 3 weeks, we 4 cg ops (that’s including me), and 2 flame ops. We ended up with 19 shots: a full CG sequence of cars racing around a fictional race track set in some dusky environment (originally based around the Speed Racer motif, but morphed into something else as time went by); a CG airplane sequence with a CG tunnel; a collapsing bridge sequence; and finally, some background replacements. Because the CG cars in the whole ad were going to be partly VisualMan’s work and partly ours, we shared the same CAD data and the same HDR. The bridge sequence was rendered in V-Ray, and the rest were rendered with Mental Ray on account of speed, as we predicted we were going to be up the wall in last-minute changes; we weren’t wrong.
Though this isn’t the first commercial I’ve led, it is the first that my current company asked me to ‘drive’, which meant to call (some of) the shots, and ‘direct’ as much as it was in my purview to do so. I enjoyed the experience very much. At the end of it, I felt very pleased at the results we got for so many shots, with so little time. Things, of course, could always be better, but I’ve been at this for so long — sounding like an broken record — that I know situations like these are never ideal. It is, however, much better to appreciate the intrinsic value of the nature of these sorts of projects and use that to learn and re-affirm my experiences. Of course, I was even more pleased when I was told that on the weight of our work on Toyotown, that the director specifically wanted to work with us again on another of his commercials (ie Kirin Mets Gachapin) few months later on.
One of the main things that I enjoyed about the project was working with a Japanese team. Their culture has always been interestingly foreign to me, and I’ve always been eagerly curious to know how it would be like to work with them. Now I know, and I’m not disappointed; though there were many difficulties with the job, as most jobs do, I appreciated their sincerity, open-mindedness, and collaborative spirit; and the fact that when it’s work time, they don’t shut off.
