Hasta La Motion!

Dexter will charm fellow officers with a doughnut, while away a Sunday with his wife Rita and the kids, or chop up a victim and package their body parts in plastic bags. Hiding beneath the mundane exterior and contrived facade of Dexter is an obsession with meting his own twisted brand of justice: stalking and murdering the guilty.

Dexter is a television drama series that first debuted in October 2006 on the American network Showtime. The first series was based loosely on ‘Darkly Dreaming Dexter’ by Jeff Lindsay, the first book in the Dexter series by the novelist.

The talented team at SWAY Studio collaborated closely with Director Norry Niven to create the new, promotional trailer for the much-anticipated 5th Season of “Dexter.” Featuring America’s favorite serial killer, Dexter Morgan, the dramatic and compelling promo literally turns Dexter’s world upside down, and entices viewers to tune in for the season premiere.

SWAY creates persuasive, photo-real, computer-generated imagery for ad agencies and other content producers using customized tools and techniques that push the boundaries of possibility, ensuring our clients’ product is leading-edge.

CREDITS
Creative Director/VFX Supervisor: Mark Glaser
Executive Producer: Jason Cohon
VFX Producer: Les G. Jones
VFX Coordinator: Andrew Gilson
3D Layout, Modeling and Animation: Scott McNeff
3D Lighting, Texturing, Rendering: Erick Schiele
Compositing Supervisor: Marguerite Cargill
Flame Artist: Elad Offer
Flame Artist: Kevin Prendiville
Flame Artist: Tim Bird
Flame Artist: Brad Scott
Nuke Artist: Olivier Sarda

RELATED LINKS
www.swaystudio.com
Official Dexter Website

With the classic song ‘Oops Upside Your Head’ by the Gap Band, a man walks down a tube station with a baffled head. By keeping his brain topped up with Juicy drench he manages to solve the puzzle. MPC was involved from an early stage, working closely with production to find the best approach to develop a Rubik’s style head.

Two masks were built, one used for the wide shots, when the actor is walking down the platform and a second one used as a model for the moving cubehead. This was built as an exact replica of the actor’s head, paying special attention to skin textures and colours.

The moves for the cubehead were carefully choreographed and the actor was then shot in the matching positions to capture his facial expressions – including his head hanging upside down drinking Drench! MPC’s 2D team led by Matthew Unwin was responsible for integrating all the elements to create a realistic head.

The puzzle head model was shot in the different combinations and MPC tracked and composited the eyes, mouth, chin and other moving parts using Nuke and Shake. Skin details were added for more realism and reflections were composited to the walls. Jean-Clement Soret added the master grade.

The Moving Picture Company (MPC) is a world leading post production facility creating high-end digital visual effects and computer animation for the feature film, advertising, music and television industries. A wholly owned subsidiary of Technicolor, MPC is based in Soho – London, Santa Monica – CA and Yale town – Vancouver. The facilities are centrally located, networked and have a dedicated digital infrastructure designed and built for our future.

CREDITS
Director: Ulf Johansson
Agency: CHI& Partners
Producer: Kate Bailey
Production Assistant: Josh Sanders
Creatives: Ed Edwards & Dave Masterman
Production Company: Smith & Jones
Production Company Producer: Philippa Smith
Editor: John Smith

Post: MPC
Post Producer: Chris Allen
VFX Supervisor: Matthew Unwin
VFX Team: Michael Gregory, Lisa Ryan, Mikael Petterson, Jason Hayes
Telecine: Jean-Clement Soret

RELATED LINKS
www.moving-picture.com

SOURCE
Moving Picture Company

”Nicktoons recently underwent a major redesign, but wanted us to take it to another place with these identities,” Michael Waldron, Creative Director says.

”Each ID targets their primary audience of pre-teen boys with concepts that explore the mood and tone of the brand and evolves it to a more a mature place.”

If there is a unifying concept to the four IDs it is that Nicktoons — the kids’ network featuring such boy-centric programs as ‘Wolverine’ and ‘The X-Men,’ ‘Speed Racer: The Next Generation,’ ‘Avatar: The Last Airbender’ and ‘Danny Phantom’ — is an expansive and larger than life world where adventure lurks just beneath the surface. It’s exciting and engaging like a great theme park ride or videogame.

”They wanted an aggressive, cinematic look that would really pull viewers off the couch and into the content,” Waldron adds. ”Each ID needed to be unique, not feel like a campaign, but each have its own aesthetic and idea.”

”Thunder,” which features an intense marriage of cell animation and 3D, begins with a violent wave demolishing a dock. Struck by a lightning bolt, the water takes on added intensity as letters suddenly emerge from the water and form a colossal Nicktoons logo.

”Popcorn Type” features a cityscape where the asphalt ruptures spewing forth the letters from the Nicktoons logo, bouncing violently — so much so, it knocks the camera on its side. The ID ends with the camera still on its side filming the logo.

”Glacier Cave” begins with a shot from within an ice cave where a beam of light shatters a thick ice wall which imprisons the letters of the Nicktoons logo.

(Click here to view the IDs)

Perhaps most surreal of all is ”Pull The Carpet,” which begins with an overhead typographical shot of a desert-like environment that has suddenly been pulled like a carpet out from under itself. As the carpet undulates, random letters tumble like a stampede toward the camera. The spot ends with the fully formed logo literally breaking the proverbial ”fourth wall” as it seemingly shatters the viewers’ TV screen.

”This project allowed us to flex our 3D muscles,” Erik van der Wilden, Director of Editorial and Animation says. ”Most of the time 3D is used to make something — a product, a person, a logo – look great. For this we used it to tell a story, a compressed one to be sure, but definitely a visceral story with a beginning, middle and end.”

While the project allowed the studio to stretch creatively and technically, for Waldron the real fun comes from working with a client like Nicktoons, who are so confident in their brand that they allowed nailgun* to play with their logo.

”Nicktoons, and Nick in general, really know their brand and because of that they’re comfortable letting us push creatively,” Waldron adds. ”They’re very collaborative and willing to let you go, and know instinctively when to pull you back. It makes for a satisfying process.”

About nailgun*
Founded by Michael Waldron and Erik van der Wilden in 2003, New York-based nailgun*, is a collaborative of artists – designers, writers, photographers, editors, producers, animators, filmmakers, illustrators, strategists, painters – who’ve come together to create unique visual solutions for clients that include ESPN, HGTV, Spike, VH1, E!, Versus, TV Land, Universal Channel, Crispin, Porter + Bogusky, Publicis, McCann-Erickson NY and Ogilvy & Mather.

CREDITS:
Client: Nick/Nicktoons
Project: Nicktoons identity package: ”Thunder,” ”Popcorn Type,” ”Glacier Cave,” and ”Pull The Carpet” (all :10’s).

Design: nailgun*, New York, NY
Creative Director: Michael Waldron
Director of Editorial and Animation: Erik van der Wilden
Senior Producer: M. Shane Dolly

”Popcorn Type”:
Design: Kyung Joo Lee
2D Animation: Ronnarit Lueangwattanakij
2D Animation: Dae Hyuk Park
3D Animation: Santiago Castano
3D Animation: Roger Hom

”Pull The Carpet”:
Design: Sooa Chung
2D Animation: Jong Soo Kim
3D Animation: Jackie Liao
3D Animation: Sung I. Sohn
3D Animation: Haowei Hu

”Thunder”:
Design: Sooa Chung
2D Animation: Cyprian Sadlon
2D Animation: Dae Hyuk Park
Flash animation/Illustration: Tristan Balos
3D Animation: Santiago Castano

”Glacier Cave”:
Design: Ronnarit Lueangwattanakij
2D Animation: Ronnarit Lueangwattanakij
3D Animation: Ronnarit Lueangwattanakij
3D Animation: Roger Hom

RELATED LINKS:
http://nailgun.tv
http://nicktoons.nick.com
www.nickpress.com

This latest spectacular high-tech storytelling achievement, uniting the talents of Director Han with those of Spinifex Group creative director Richard Lindsay and his colleagues, builds upon their joint efforts during the historic Opening Ceremony of the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games, wherein Spinifex was distinguished as one of the only non-Chinese production company involved.

“A state-of-the-art vision for the Water Show Spectacle provides a beginning to a whole new way of Chinese storytelling using new digital technologies,” said Director Han.

The magnificent Yan City attraction features a stunning re-creation of the ancient city, a museum, a world-class zoo, a philosophers’ garden, and a theme park. Each night, thousands of visitors will simultaneously experience a spectacular, 45-minute water show, which features Spinifex’s multimedia rendering of “The Past Meets the Future.” The content begins on the 250-meter-wide wall of the museum, then appears on a unique 100-meter-wide retractable scrim array, floating on a man-made lake. The content is choreographed to a wide variety of state-of-the-art show effects, including fireworks, water screens, laser and fog machines, and surround sound.

According to Lindsay, the first challenge for Spinifex was to concept the story, and the storytelling techniques, to artfully treat the ancient Chinese Spring/Autumn period. “Through our experiences on the Beijing Olympics, we proved we could romantically bring ancient storytelling to life using modern techniques,” said Lindsay.

“This is where we came to greatly appreciate Director Han’s strengths in theatre, lighting, innovative sets and mechanics. The brief he gave us for this project was to reflect on the ancient philosophies of Spring/Autumn with an abstract, spirited, and very romantic treatment. As we progressed, he looked to us to help express the nature and storytelling aspects of the show using large format projection across various, large-scale screens.” he continued.

To address the need to cover a long period of history in sweeping fashion, Spinifex proposed a stylistic approach that allowed the visual storytelling to be both abstract and dramatic. Typical for the group’s assignments, where the end-product is most often a one-of-a-kind immersive experience, the deliverables were custom tailored to suit the unique venue.

As mentioned, the viewing experience of “The Past Meets the Future” involves the presentation moving across different media: The content first appears in 16:9 HD format, until the screen grows in width to a 7:1 ratio, displaying 7k images. Building upon its track record for presenting audiences with stories that seamlessly make historical use of digital technologies, Spinifex designed this project’s cinematic content to expand and maximize the changing presentation media.

According to the Spinifex production leads, art director Jamie Tuffrey and motion director Matt Lock, the project represented a unique challenge in delivering to the clients’ high expectations within a conservative budget. Live-action production involved a single day of production on green screen, where the source footage was then composited into the digital world, comprised of matte paintings, visual FX and limited 3D elements.

“We decided not to go into a full 3D world, but rather to create the scenes with clever use of 2D motion graphics and matt painting,” said Lock. Working with Director Yang Qingsheng, with whom Spinifex also collaborated on numerous projects, such as the Beijing Olympics, Shanghai World Expo and Hennessey, original footage was captured on the Red Digital Cinema camera at 4K, which allowed great latitude in the composite. China was chosen for the location due to Director Yang’s expertise in Chinese culture, and the ready availability of costumes and props.

To create the project’s ambitious slate of original design elements and animated content, including swords, arrows and flags, Spinifex 3D lead Pepin Portingale and his fellow artists used Autodesk 3ds Max. Matt Lock handled the project’s complex motion design, compositing and VFX challenges, finishing the HD content using Adobe After Effects as the predominant compositing platform.

“We are very thankful to Director Han and everyone involved for making us part of this amazing project,” added Lindsay. “We have deep respect for China and its people, and we feel very fortunate to have contributed to such a world-class show. We are very proud to know that, for every person who goes to Yan City now and in the future, ‘The Past Meets the Future’ will help them to fully experience its wonders.”

Sydney-based Spinifex Group is a creative communications company that partners with agencies, event companies and corporate clients worldwide to blend creativity and technology into experiences that are impactful, relevant and enduring. A true concept-to-completion creative group, Spinifex nurtures original ideas from production to delivery in an environment of innovation and uncompromising integrity, combining time-honored storytelling traditions with the tools of the digital age. Diverse, inventive, and often entrusted with stories of cultures not our own, our creative interpretations continue to be celebrated by local and international audiences alike.

With recent projects ranging from immersive interactive experiences to global broadcast events and epic big screen corporate communications extravaganzas, we are very proud to have resolved some of the most ambitious and complex storytelling challenges of our times, with historical results.

www.spinifexgroup.com

Having been successfully selected as one of the three chosen companies (along with LOLA and Modus FX), Jellyfish Pictures was tasked with developing a genre-changing series style with the team at Nutopia and Jellyfish partners Modus FX, worked on the all important first three episodes, which achieved the highest ever ratings on the History Channel.

Jellyfish Pictures – Visual effects Supervisor : Hasraf “ HaZ” Dulull and Creative Director : Phil Dobree break down the challenges encountered in creating the journey though the history of America with the use of art directed stylish CG and VFX.

The visual effects for ‘America – The Story of US’ were central to the narrative of the series. The unique CGI sequences were created by adopting techniques from feature films married with the dynamic, sweeping camera moves of the games industry. This created a hybrid narrative device that enables American history to be told in a totally new way. By using CGI as a linking and narrative device, the viewer can travel through time and space and get a condensed action packed view of American history.

These VFX styles and techniques were used to tell the stories of environments transforming, massive migrations, iconic landmarks and cities building over time over 12 hours of television.

One of the many challenges included creating the underwater look because the director wanted a specific look for the Atlantic Ocean (between stylised and photoreal – which was the series style) at the same time it had to reflect the surface environment where we transition through the hull of the ship to a live action takeover.

Using Autodesk Softimage XSI ICE tree compound system we were able to simulate water, caustic surface reflections and the boat’s wake. We then used compositing to transition from the CG boat to the interior live action shot by importing the CG camera data into our compositing tool : The Foundry’s Nuke.

Several additional passes of CG were rendered out such as a normal lighting pass, irradiance pass, specific IDs and motion vector passes to allow full creative control in compositing because the look of the shot was evolving constantly. Additional live action elements such as floating particles were added which helped give the ocean the illusion of depth.

There were also shots which involved mixing live action plates with CG to create one seamless camera move, one example of this is the pull out of the boat to reveal the land of promise in episide 01. This involved a live action plate of an actor climbing out of a hatch shot on blue screen (it was shot on a very tight schedule with a locked off camera on a ladder). It was then composited onto the CG boat and deck with a CG camera driving the whole sequence. Additional details such as the actor’s shadow and wet textures were projected onto the CG boat to help it work as a seamless shot.

Using historical naval research provided by the production research team the CG boat was accurately created right down to the way the rope rigging was setup for the sails and the way the barrels are positioned on the deck.

In the following shot the CG camera races over the surface of a CG ocean to reveal land ahead. A transition through trees reveals the land of promise. In line with the series style this shot had to be generated quickly and have a look which was not photoreal but have enough of a real accurate feel to match the live action shots around it.

Landscape generation was done through VUE, with effects added in compositing along with a CG eagle helping to create a strong and distinctive style. We created a workflow between VUE, XSI and Nuke to allow for a completely seamless camera move through the 3 sections of the shots.

VUE was incredibly useful to create huge expansive landscape allowing us to create previz frames which were close to the final shot so the director could see in advance how it would sit in the sequence.

Having a stylish creative look allowed us creative freedom to do things which didn’t have to follow certain visual rules such as the use of hyper-realistic motion blur to enhance the fast dynamic camera moves in the shot.

From the start of the project the client made it clear that they wanted a particular stylised look that was new to television. This meant changing our normal photoreal workflow and mindset, giving us more freedom to create exciting long CG shots that help link stories far apart in time and space.

Abandoning the normal constraints of working in photoreal helped us achieve what would otherwise have been very complex and expensive photoreal shots. We maintained that look throughout all the episodes we worked on including shots with live action plates of actors and environments.

We knew there was going to be a lot of set extension work on a tight deadline, so we made good use of Nuke’s 3D environment, using projected matte paintings split up into several layers onto geometry and distorted cards to give parallax without having to render a CG environment.

Nuke X’s 3D camera tracker actually solved some tracking issues we couldn’t solve in other packages which meant we got our camera and cloud point data instantly within Nuke and were able to attach cards in the correct 3d space using the cloud point data generated within Nuke X.

One example of this was on the Boston wharf sequence for Episode 01. What made this shot challenging was a lot of complex tracking without any on set data (due to the fast paced nature of the shoot on set). Tracking was carried out using Syntheyes and Nuke X’s new 3D tracking feature. The original plate was shot in South Africa, so all the modern elements needed to be replaced and then digitally extended.

A combination of matte paintings, CG renders and camera projections inside our 3D compositing tool Nuke allowed the shot to be constructed completely inside compositing without any 3D sequence rendering required. Using Nuke’s 3D space we placed the boats docked on cards, added soldiers on the decks and the other areas as well as environment atmospherics.

The original 2D matte painting concept was used as a previz and once signed off we used that to finalise the look and then broke it up into several layers of elements to be re-projected onto geometry in Nuke so when the camera moves you get true parallax and it feels 3D rather than 2D.

Click here for more information and to view trailers for the series.

TOOLS
-Nuke X (compositing)
– Autodesk Softimage XSI and 3D Studio Max (3D)
– Syntheyes (tracking)
– VUE (environments)

CREDITS
Jellyfish Pictures:
Creative Director: Phil Dobree
VFX Producer: Sophie Orde
VFX Supervisor (Modus Canada): Yanick Wilisky
VFX Supervisor (Jellyfish London): Haz Dulull
Lead VFX Compositor: Eloi Brunelle

RELATED LINKS
www.jellyfishpictures.co.uk