Asylum Introduces Verizon’s Droid Smartphone

[NEWS=”http://www.cgnews.com/wp-content/uploads/verizon_boat_thumb.jpg”]22575[/NEWS]Asylum’s VFX team in collaboration with mcgarry bowen and MJZ’s Rupert Sanders recently completed work on a spectacular spot launching Verizon’s highly anticipated Droid smartphone. The: 60 features incredible CG environments that showcase Asylum’s incomparable expertise in creating realistic FX, this time embedded within a suspenseful and visually stunning narrative. Stealth begins with a squadron of stealth bombers thundering through a cloud-filled sky and launching a salvo of small pods toward earth, a beautiful scene rendered entirely in CGI. From the ground bewildered ranchers, lumberjacks, fishermen, and others watch the pods simmer through the sky, CGI smoke trails marking their path.

The mountaintops, prairies, and mid-ocean landscape that the observers watch from are stunning panoramas created in Maya, Terragen, Renderman, BodyPaint, and others, and then composited in Nuke using multiple floating-point, linear light passes.

The pods explode into the ground – an effect achieved with a combination of live action and Flame composite. The contraptions survive in one piece, however, and when the live-action pod spins open, a shimmering CGI backdrop outlines the glowing Droid phone, also done in CGI.

Asylum packaged all of this footage into a custom interface that controlled the comp process and guaranteed a consistent look from shot to shot. They created an additional custom UI tool in Nuke to create the lens flare and lighting effects that incorporate realistic camera motion, reflections, and light leaks. Previsualization was built as a combination of 3D animation and reference footage taken from multiple sources.

Asylum is a premier visual effects and design company, handling high-profile features, commercials, music videos, and emerging media content for web and mobile platforms. Asylum created the visual effects for such films as the upcoming Terminator Salvation, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Pirates Of The Caribbean ll & lll, Master And Commander: The Far Side Of The World (Academy Award and BAFTA nominated), Moulin Rouge, Minority Report, Phantom Of The Opera, Mel Gibson’s Apocalypto, Tony Scott’s déjà vu, Man on Fire & Domino and Ridley Scott’s Black Hawk Down.

Asylum has done spot work for brands such as Hershey’s, Nike, Sony Playstation, Coke, BMW, Gatorade and Apple. In addition, Asylum Design has created award winning title and graphic design work for such films as Tim Burton’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Bedtime Stories, X-Men I & II, The Island, Bad Boys II and XXX.

CREDITS
Client: Verizon
Spots Title: Stealth
Air Date: November 2009

Agency: mcgarrybowen, New York
Executive Creative Director: Mark Koelfgen
Executive Creative Director: Warren Eakins
Copywriter: Tiffany Smith
Art Director: Michael Cannova
Head of Broadcast Production: Rosanne Horn

Production Company: MJZ, Los Angeles
Director: Rupert Sanders
Executive Producer: Eric Stern
Director of Photography: Alwin Kuchler
Line Producer: Laurie Boccaccio

Editorial Company: Spot Welders
Editor: Neil Smith

Post/Effects: Asylum
Visual Effects Supervisor: Robert Moggach
Executive Producer: Michael Pardee
Producer: Jason Cohon
Coordinator: Diana Cheng
CG Producer: Jeff Werner
CG Supervisor: Jens Zalzala
Compositing Lead: Miles Essmiller
Lead Modeler: Greg Stuhl

Music: Q Department
Sound Designer: Brian Emrich
Sound Design Company: Trinitite Studios

Mix: Lime
Mixer: Loren Silber

RELATED LINKS

www.asylumfx.com

Shilo: Under Armour “ColdGear, Lindsey Vonn + Dick’s”

SHILO_UA

The creative forces of Shilo strike again, this time to simulate extreme cold weather conditions for Under Armour, with Dicks Sporting Goods as the testing grounds.

With the goal of promoting Under Armour’s ColdGear product line, Shilo enlisted the talents of its growing creative arm, We Make It Good, and its creative director, Clayton Vomero, who co-wrote the spot’s script with Shilo Creative Director Andre Stringer.

Stringer and Vomero built a narrative around a Cold Abuse Simulator, which tests ColdGear under harsh downhill ski racing conditions. Two-time World Cup champion Lindsey Vonn, one of the most successful American ski racers in history, was enlisted as the ultimate test subject.

To film the action of Vonn facing the Cold Abuse Simulator as realistically as possible, Shilo’s crew found a factory location in Los Angeles and worked with Vonn for two days, filming her on a jostling rig before a giant apparatus that simulated the conditions she’d face on the mountain.

Seemless vfx integration and a solid storyline makes this a campaign to keeps your eyes on. Be sure to check out the making of video via the ski channel, as well as more behind the scenes production stills, courtesy of NBC Olympics.

Posted on Motionographer

eyeon Interviews 2012’s Marc Weigert

eyeon’s CEO, Steve Roberts, recently interviewed Marc Weigert, Co-producer and VFX Supervisor of 2012. Here’s the link to the interview.

Enjoy, Sue

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=siBHQXxSSV0

How to eliminate flicker with curve tool

Can someone guide me through the process of eliminating flicker in a sequence by using the curve tool?
I know i can let the curve tool analyse my frame range for average intensities. But what exactly do i do with the values afterwards? Someone posted some time ago you can then use those values in a grade node, but how and where? Gain, gamma, offset? Do i use the raw values or do i need to negate those values? I tried different combinations, but never got the desired result.

Flairs – Truckers Delight

I wouldn’t exactly label this as highbrow, more like highfun! It’s pretty crazy and leans heavily on the raunchier side of life. Directed by Jérémie Périn.

Definitely NSFW, but probably worth getting fired for!

Posted on Motionographer

Choose different presets when nuke is starting

Hi everybody

How it’s possible to have a window prompt when nuke is starting, to choose an environnement preset (fps ect) from a list, and load it?

thx a lot

Maya starter: Object with multiple materials, merged as 1 object?

Hey guys, I got a (hopefully simple) question. I’ve got an model in maya which seems it consists out of different parts. However, it is selected as one single object, and I can’t seem to separate them (not with ungroup at least).

However, they got different materials assigned to it, one shiny grey phong, one matte black phong, and one transparent glass looking phong.

These are actually the three objects I would like to separate. Since they got different materials assigned to it, it seems like they’re separate objects. Is there a way to separate these objects ?

Thanks,

Dashinuke

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Model a natural environment with mountain, rocks and river, just using the Displace modifier in 3ds max