Hasta La Motion!

Dallas-based Element X Creative garners a trainload of nostalgia for the AICP Southwest Awards Show with their 2011 Sponsor Reel.

Through a mixture of blood, sweat, miniatures and CG, the Element X team “came together to write, storyboard, model, texture, shoot, rig, animate, composite and edit the final [5-minute] product” in short order. Four weeks, to be exact.

Of course, the storyline echoes several other time-rigging plots in popular science fiction media (e.g., two Back to the Future Easter eggs), but in this rendition, hitching a ride through Element X’s innocent world of special relativity makes sitting through a usually long drawn-out list of sponsor logos feel like the speed of light.

Element X was kind enough to elaborate on the development from beginning to end — nuts, bolts, and tools. Check out the process in their own words after the jump.

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From Executive Producer, Rick Perez:

Twenty-six extremely talented people, 90 Shots, 377 GB of files, two melted building models, all produced in four weeks in our spare time (if you want to call nights and weekends spare time).

Our creative minds here at Element X Creative (Dallas, TX) were pretty stoked about the Association of Independent Commercial Producers (AICP) asking us to create this year’s Sponsor Reel for the Southwest show. The creative carte blanche was daunting given such a small window of time to concept and produce a 5-minute piece. Adding to the challenge were our own high expectations, not only in terms of storytelling, but also wanting to create something that had not been done in the history of the show.

During the conceptualization phase, one of our big breakthroughs was our lack of time in general. Short deadlines are notorious in this industry and we’ve all yearned to stop time for a second and catch our breath. This idea, fused with the childhood nostalgia of miniatures and train sets, became the base foundation for our story.

Beyond the short-notice four-week production window and already ongoing gigs in house, we tackled many other production hurdles. We decided to shoot the background plates on a Canon 60D for several reasons: (A) these DSLRs are just pumping out fantastic pictures, and the readily available lens selections make getting the right angle easy; (B) we wanted to shoot over-cranked at 60 fps to help sell the scale of the miniatures as larger than they were — also some of the cars/trains that we moved practically through the scene, would look more realistic slowed down a bit; and (C) the flip-out screen made it super easy to get into tighter spaces, and to see what was going on quickly.

We also chose to shoot at a minimum of f/11, and when possible f/16 — I wanted to keep the DOF deeper, so it would seem more like it was photographed in the real world. We still wanted selective focus, but just not as much as you usually see when people show you photos of a miniature layout. This required us to dump a lot of light on the set to be able to shoot that stopped-down and still maintain a low ISO.

Last, we tried to get the camera as close as we could to ground level to mimic a large set — again with miniatures photographed that you might see, frequently it is shot from high above, since that is our natural vantage point in relation to them.

Using our internally developed OTTO rigging system, we put it through its paces quickly setting up dozens of characters and vehicles. Shooting such small miniatures with extreme focal lengths also made the 3D camera tracks challenging in certain shots. Logos were also pouring in at the last minute, so compositing was being handled up until the final hour.

Many late nights and take-out orders later, combined with a custom score and sound effects mix from Tequila Mockingbird, we came away with a unique animation that we are very proud of.

So take a peek at our latest and greatest! We hope you have as much fun watching it as our hero had while running around in the tiny world we created for him.

Official Press Release

CREDITS
Director — Brad Herbert

Executive Producers — Chad Briggs, Rick Perez
Producer — Amy Cass

Director of Photography — Brad Herbert
Location Crew — Luis Martinez, Jiss Kuruvilla
Location Manager — Robert Bray

CG Director — Eric J. Turman

Animation Director — Luis Martinez
Animators — Aaron Werntz, Steve “Q” Quentin, Andrea Thomas

Lead Modeler — Christopher McCabe
Modelers — Bobby Reynolds, Mathew Nith

Lead Rigger — Christopher McCabe
Rigger – Eric Turman

Editor — Luis Martinez, Brad Herbert

Lead Lighting Artist — Christopher McCabe
Lighting Artists — Dennis Kang, Mike Martin, Chad Briggs, Jason Moxon

Surfacing Artist — Christopher McCabe, Bobby Reynolds

Lead Compositor — Brad Herbert
Compositors — Dennis Kang, Mark Lopez ,Mike Martin, Laura Wallace, Christopher McCabe, Chad Briggs

Visual Effects — Dennis Kang, Mike Martin, Laura Wallace

Render Wrangler — Candace Morrish

Pipeline/Tools Programming — Steven Keiswetter

IT Director — Greg Glaser

Audio provided by Tequila Mockingbird
Executive Producer — Angie Johnson
Composer — Justin Tapp
Sound Design — Shayna Brown
Mix — Marty Lester

Background Plates : LMRA Railroad Activity
Special Thanks : Robert Bray (LMRA)

TOOLS
3D Package — Soft Image 2012 (.5)
Rigging — otto|rig — Proprietary Rigging Plug-in
Sculpting — Z Brush 4.2
Rendering — Arnold 1.13
Tracking — Syntheyes
Compositing — After Effects CS 5.5
Custom Scripts — Python
Cannon Cameras — 5D and 60D

Posted on Motionographer

Last week I posted this cute little spot directed by Andy McLeod from London-based Rattling Stick. I finally managed to get my hands on some behind-the-scenes-info, and there’s a fair bit of really delightful facts here:

1. What was the agency’s initial brief?

‘Be Natural’ is a juice made entirely of natural ingredients. So the basic thought was that if Nature itself (here represented by the bird) could choose a juice, it would be Robinson’s ‘Be Natural.’

2. Describe the production process—what happened next?

The agency wanted everything to be done as ‘naturally’ as possible, to reflect the nature of the product, and I felt that was absolutely the right way to go about it as well. Pretty much everything you see on screen was done for real, in-camera, with as little CG and post as possible. It was hard work, but I think this made it more controllable, and more fun.

We had a bird trainer train six identical birds to do various set of actions. One was good at picking up the wooden toy and putting it in the basket, another was good at turning on the TV, another was good at going over to the fridge, and so on.

3. How did you get the bird to perform various actions? Tell us a few tricks to make it all look so believable!

The key to the trick was birdseed. To get the bird to ‘turn the TV off,’ you put a seed on the remote control, the bird then pecked it off, and you remove the seed in post later on. We also shot a real TV remote, scaled it down, and placed it over our miniature TV remote in post. Similarly with all the other actions: to get the bird to look at the TV screen, you place the seed just above the it, and so on.

We shot multiple takes of each action, picking the best bits out of them. It’’s a more painstaking process than it looks on paper, and it took the trainer a couple of weeks to get the birds to do it.

4. Tell us more about the environment–was it all miniature?

Yes. We had a great production designer who designed the interior–we wanted it to be impressive, and tardis-like. Then we spent a lot of time working out the right dimensions of objects within the birdhouse, to get the scale right, and even more time building the whole set, so it looked absolutely real.

5. And how did you shoot it all?

The size of the birdhouse was approx. 10 square ft. We placed four mini HD cameras strategically around it, to capture the action from several different angles.

6. My favorite was the human cuckoo clock idea. How did it came about?

Well, we wanted the spot to have plenty of repeat-viewing value, so we built lots of little jokes into our set, and the cuckoo clock was one of them. That sequence also worked as a time-filler, between the bird going to the fridge, and sitting at the table for tea, because there was no way we could get it to set the table or pour the juice out.

Some of the other ‘jokes’ are: worm sausages, family portraits, bird news featuring a police arrest photo of a cat, bird-shaped wellies (waterproof rubber boots–ed) by the door, a stag beetle’s antler trophy, and a ‘Tweet’ Magazine.

7. That’s fantastic! Lastly, are there any other particular aspects of the spot that you paid special attention to?

I was keen for the bird to have ‘human’ traits, seeing as it’s already got a ‘humanistic’ apartment. So we spent lots of time at the sound studio trying to get the bird’s chirping to sound like human expressions: annoyance at having to tidy up, shock at the news story, giggling at tweet magazine, whistling along to the music. I think in the end there was a fair bit of my whistling blended into real bird sounds to get the desired effect!

Posted on Motionographer