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.
This job was won from the strength of another win that was Toyotown: the director was rather pleased with our abilities, and wanted to work with us again. The Toyotown job had been given to me to lead; and I wanted to prove that a good workflow means all the difference to a good-looking product or a bad one. It gave the group an opportunity to prove ourselves successful without the legacy workflow encumbrances we would otherwise have carried.
But it was a disappointment to find out that the team wouldn’t get another go at it: I was asked to revert back to my titular role as ‘cg supervisor’, a euphemism for high-level cg minion, and everyone else knew we would be going back to the same wretched workflow we were trying to change. I don’t know why, but perhaps, now that it had been won, it was status quo ante bellum, and all that.
My contribution was mainly the Realflow water sims and particle effects, the rigging of Gachapin (the character), scene layouts, matchmoving, and pipeline wrangling and custom development.
We had been RND’ing Hybrido sims during pre-production with the (wrong) assumption that the sweet spot for the water sim would be when the character is almost upright. Hybrido did this well, but in the middle of the schedule, we were informed that depicting something coming out of the water in Japan was a no-no (something to do with the population’s sensitivity towards tsunamis, we were told), and the speed of the rising of Gachapin had to be slow, and yet it must depicted as powerful. Thus, we had to throw out weeks’ worth of RND, and ended up fudging and cheating a powerful effect when the character barely rises from the surface. I ended up chucking Hybrido and used a combination of Realwave sims, splash emitters, and Maya’s particles.
The job offered more surprises as conflicting intentions came up surfacing (pun intended). At the last minute, we were asked to come up with a fur solution, scrambled Seekscale to do cloud rendering to help manage the unexpectedly-heavy renders, but still needed to throw back the schedule for a week.
The contributing shot I like best is the water spray shot. It was also the last shot that was approved because it kept on coming back: I couldn’t get it right, for some reason. Then years of experience shouted inside my brain and told me: cheat the shit of it. So I took old water renders, which weren’t even properly tracked to the newest character renders, and put in multiple layers of Trapcode Particular particles, fudged stuff around, and voila: approved!
When I said this job was a difficult road, it was not the work that I was referring to, but the knowledge that I haven’t made a difference. To make a difference lies in constantly making a difference, effecting change; but it becomes impossible if simple opportunities are stunted by the constant retreat to status quo.
Remember that this work thread is about the fact that cg projects are rarely straightforward; one artist might look he’s not doing anything, when, in fact, he’s doing everything, and vice-versa.
My contribution to this commercial is intermingled with the fact that it had been animated, and its look set up by someone else to be rendered in Octane, a GPU-based, unbiased renderer, presumably to make rendering faster and more beautiful. However, it wasn’t faster, and it wasn’t that much more beautiful, as the look was mainly AO-like. Time was running out. We have a renderfarm that can render mental ray, V-Ray, LightWave, and After Effects; but not Octane. So, it was passed on to me so I can render and comp it in time. Not surprisingly, it wasn’t just about hitting the render button in LightWave.
I took the original assets, replaced everything with LightWave shaders, tweaked the shadows and diffuse shading so that they matched, as close as possible, to the original test Octane renders, and had to fix many of the errors present in the scene, as well a number of broken models. I strategised on how much needs rendering based on the animatics; I used Janus, the ultimate LW ass-saver, to breakout lots of the necessary animated elements and mattes, and rendered them; Richard and I did the motion graphics, and I comped everything for the final product in After Effects.
This hot-potato workflow, in which a project is tossed completely to another person to be rescued, is out of my control; I simply have to do it. The main problem I have with it is that few recognises it as that: a pawning-off of accountability and yet accepting the full credit for it (as such, I’m not credited). And, again, this is why this work thread is being written: a project like this would not have seen the light of day if someone hadn’t objectively dealt with the details that were required to actually finish the job to the client’s standards. What you see isn’t what went on.
There are hard facts in professional workflows, which some are in denial of. Workflows that fly against simple reason will not get them where they want, no matter how much they cuss or growl at the monitor. There is a lesson to be learnt here, but are those who need to learn it actually get it?
