SFX for spots: studios working on commercials are bringing big-screen effects to living rooms nationwide

Post, Jan, 2005 by Ann Fisher

In a Petco campaign for The Phelps Group in LA, employees test out products the animals use and, in Adler's favorite, swim with the fishes. Steele VFX won the pitch for the :30, Aquarium by proving that 3D animation was a much better option than building an actual life-size fish tank. The effects run the gamut--underwater greenscreen photography composited with photoreal CG goldfish and live action plates of swimmers and the store.

NewTek LightWave 8 was used to create the fish and some of the reflections. Quantel eQ and Henry were used for compositing; Monique Eissing worked on the latter: Adler was the director of visual effects, Jerry Steele was lead compositor and Wayne England animated the fish. The spot aired this winter.

RHINOFX

At RhinoFX (www.rhinofx.tv) in NYC, where they do 2D and 3D photoreal effects for spots and films, partner/visual effects supervisor Vico Sharabini sees another trend--the use of stills. "Both directors and agencies want to use stills more and more," says Sharabini. "We've been using stills for years in order to create backgrounds or elements, but today it seems like still work has more extensive usage. The reason I call it a trend is the usage is not limited to one aspect. It's not landscape reconstruction and [putting] something in the background or sky replacement, It's more extensive than that. Some of the reasons are because of cost. It's easier to get a still crew than a film crew. Some people use it as second units, some people use it as a limitation or a conceptual thing. For every project, we use it differently. Throughout the years, we've been using still photography to get the perfect reference for our photorealistic CG."

For a Life Magazine commercial, agency Heavy (NYC), came to RhinoFX with digital stills and asked for a :30 spot. The stills feature a child in a greenhouse, a barn, someone jumping in the air, a boat, a girl with a balloon and a dog in the back of a truck. Rhino isolated elements to give them more depth.

"What we did that has not usually been done is we combined photogrametry technique, in order to get fisheye lens distortion, and different perspective around the barn, in order to get a very close camera move which is impossible to get with any other technique. Photogrametry is a technique where you take an image and you project it on a 3D model. What you get is the ability to go around the object," he explains.

Sharabini used Inferno to rearrange image models and create camera moves around them. A more complex shot--the girl running with the balloon on a hill--was modeled in Alias Maya 6 on Linux and brought into Inferno 5 in order to give the grass texture more depth than would have been possible with cutouts or stills. It was also a faster method of pulling off the effect.