rowe’s f150 and flexing ford

Happy link dump day! The day that comes every once in a while where I have some cool stuff to blog about but I’m just too damn lazy to write a full post about each one!

Excited? Well here we go!

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The web campaign for the 2009 Ford F150 that Speedshape just finished up a couple months ago, and that Jess and I composited in Nuke, went live over the weekend. The work we did is located at the end of each section. Just click on the links after each video starring Discovery’s Mike Rowe.

LINK: All New Ford F150

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Next up is a making of video done by Speedshape’s own Rob Nederhorst. He talks about the work our LA studio did on the national Ford Flex commercial campaign.

LINK: Flex VFX Muscles for Ford

VFX house Speedshape, agency Team Detroit and director Mark of Anonymous Content came together to create a virtual city in the new campaign for Ford’s new Flex SUV. Watch the “Making of” video to see how Speedshape approached and executed these two commercials.

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And last but not least is very sweet youtube video courtesy of Jess…

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Alright, Happy Monday everyone!

the mill’s timesculpture

If you work in the commercial industry long enough, you’ll undoubtedly hear two words that simultaneously conjures up the tackiness of bad lens flares and reverence at the same time.

Bullet Time.

I’ve heard those words quite a lot recently, and let me tell you…it’s a very tricky thing to pull off. And pull of WELL at that. Which is exactly what the London based Visual Effects Studio, The Mill, did for Toshiba’s new $4.7 million spot called “Timesculpture“. That alone is enough to give praise for, but The Mill also made a very cool step forward by animating within the ‘freeze frame’. What does that mean exactly? Well watch the spot below and find out.

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It was filmed with 200 Gigashot camcorders which were mounted onto a 360 degree 14-meter diameter rig. All of which took three days just to focus/align and were wired up to a single remote. This monster then captured an ungodly 20 terabytes of frames, which were then all roto’d and comp’d together. Head spinning? Ya, mine too. And that’s really only scratching the surface of what The Mill and Toshiba accomplished here. Check out the ‘making of’ below.

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LINK: The Mill

The Mill is a world renowned, Oscar-winning visual effects company, based in London, New York and LA, which specialises in high-end VFX for commercials.

LINK: Toshiba Gigashot HD camcorder

The Gigashot range delivers a comprehensive set of features and offers both HD video and still imaging capabilities. With up to 100GB of inbuilt hard drive capacity and true 1080i high definition recording capabilities, the Gigashot range provides the perfect, affordable next generation video recording solution. “Toshiba is making an aggressive move into the HD camcorder market, with the aim of being the number two player worldwide by 2009,” said Marco Perino, General Manager EMEA, OC Options Peripherals and Services. Toshiba Europe. “With the Gigashot series, we are confident of a strong start to 2008.”

LINK: Toshiba ‘Timesculpture’ Upscaling

Buy Laptops.

Pretty incredible huh?

zurich chamber orchestra

I’m in love with the design of this ad.

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LINK: llamamelola.com

This is the site I found the below downloadable video below.

LINK: Download HIGH RES Video

Plays with VLC player.

The spot was done by the agency Euro RSCG Zürich. And the clip from YouTube is kind of at a low quality, so here are some high res stills for you to admire.

So simple, so beautiful, so expertly executed. And a great way to end a long day at work.

creatalutionism

God I love this game…

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LINK: SPORE

Now if you look below, this post is categorized in the Visual Effects section. So here’s the question of the day:

Q: How is ‘Spore’ related to world of visual effects?

A: Tippet Studios did the fantastic ‘Spore’ theatrical spots for EA.

Cool huh?

spy hunter making of

The glorious TD that is Dave Grey sent me this making of video for Sway’s ‘Spy Hunter’ spot this morning. It features sweet music, gravity defying car stunts, and a cat that lives in their ceiling. Have I peaked your interest yet? Then check it out!

LINK: The Making Of The Pontiac G8 “Spy Hunter” Commercial

We have a similar driving simulator here at Speedshape, and yes…it is just as much fun to play with as it looked in that video.

krakatoa

short and sweet post this afternoon. “Deadline” is the secret word of the day.

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I found this really cool ‘Snickers’ spot over at the CGSociety today. It was done by a company called Unexpected in Germany. And they used a new particle simulation program called Krakatoa. It’s a pretty mean piece of software.

It’s capable of rendering hundreds of thousands of particles with ease, while still keeping light on it’s feet through a particle caching technique.

This allowed a calculation to be recycled for different passes such as for the diffuse layer, RGB layer for different PFlow events and, of course, for changing values afterward, like size of particles.

It was developed by the software division of ‘Frantic Films‘, and plugs right into 3DsMax.

Pretty cool tech man.

Read more about it and the spot after the break…

LINK: Krakatoa on Rugby

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This is a two spot campaign and the next commercial is due out later this year.

The first spot “RUGBY,” is currently airing throughout Russia, while a second spot, “TAG,” breaks in fall 2008.

I can’t wait!

UPDATE

Thanks to Borislav at Frantic Films for more details about Krakatoa! Apparently I didn’t even scratch the surface of how many particles it can render with my research pointing to hundreds of thousands. According to Frantic Films it’s capable of rendering..

140 million particles, give or take, depending on what
shading features have been requested. Some of our
customers have pushed it in the direction of
a billion.

Needless to say that’s a huge accomplisment!

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Alright, that’s it for today. My renders are almost off the farm so it’s back to work I go! Talk to you tomorrow, I hope you’re all doing well!

quaker state

The Speedshape Quarterlies were a lot of fun the other night. And once again we were all amazed at how quickly the bar tab runs out! Speedshape rented out this really cool old movie theater called ‘The Magic Bag’ over in Ferndale. And we got to see all of the work that we’ve done over the past few months. It was pretty incredible to see just how much work has been pumped out in so little time. And just how good all of it was as well!

One of the spots that stole the show was Speedshape LA’s new Quaker State ad. You might have already seen it already, but just in case you haven’t I posted the video below. It looks like all of the months of hard work over on the left coast really paid off big time!

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Follow the link below for a higher res version of the spot and the full credit list…

LINK: Quaker State motor oil (Battle)

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Alright that’s it for today. Only one more day until Jess and I go on vacation! And I can’t wait.

2 Nights in Miami, then 5 nights out at sea. And it’s our first real vacation together! It’s going to be awesome. I love her.

Ok…off to work. Talk to you all soon!

bmw making of and tutli-putli

DigitalContentProducer.com is just full of goodness this Monday!

A few months ago I wrote about the BMW Hydrogen spot that Fuel FX did. And today DCP.com posted an article detailing the making of the spot. As well as a nice little tech demo! Pretty cool stuff, check it out…

LINK: Step by Step: The Fuel In BMW’s Hydrogen

When the Visual Effects Society recently chose the year’s outstanding visual effects commercials, the work of Sydney, Australia-based Fuel VFX was among them.

LINK: DCPTV – Making the BMW Hydrogen 7 Spot

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DCP.com also posted an awesome article of the short film Madame Tutli-Putli. If you haven’t seen anything about this amazing stop motion film, then do yourself a favor and follow the links below. It’s not only beautiful but also technically amazing.

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LINK: Step by Step – Madame Tutli-Putli

“Those eyes!” is a popular reaction to Madame Tutli-Putli, a stop-motion animated film featuring characters whose eyes appear to be alive. The reason Madame and her fellow silicone puppets seem so soulful is because actual actors’ eyes were videotaped, extracted, and timed to the puppets’ movements. The effect is captivating, and it has helped Madame Tutli-Putli earn honors at film festivals from Cannes to New York, along with an Oscar nomination for Best Animated Short.

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Alright that’s it for today. But I hope everyone had a great weekend! Jess and I are counting down the days till Friday when we get to go on our week long Caribbean vacation! God I can’t wait. The winter this year in Michigan was just horrible, so we really need fun in the sun!

Talk to you all soon!

recession, smeshssion

Well I guess it really depends on who you talk to. The higher ups in our current administration and the FED tend to lean towards the “No no no, we’re not in a recession. Keep spending money.” While others on the ground floor can clearly see that we are indeed in a recession. Possibly even close to a depression. I think Detroit has been one of the first places to really see this first hand.

I know, it’s scary. But I really don’t see how people can be that surprised. I mean all that little dollar bill in your pocket is really worth now a days is how much faith you have in the government to honor it’s worth. Which faith in our government seems to be at an all time low lately. Now it used to be that the dollar bill was an actual receipt for that amount in gold. But after the Federal Reserve Act was passed under everyones noses back in 1920 on Christmas Eve, the FED had complete control to print as much ‘money’ as they wanted. And I guess it’s not a coincidence that the board game ‘Monopoly’ was also made in the 1920′s. Because that’s effectively what that amendment turned our money into. Worthless strips of paper.

Now what does this long rant have to do with visual effects? Well, a lot.

We have another storm coming. First it was the WGA, DGA, and SAG strikes. Now…it’s the big one. Because for the first time industry projections are showing that our business is in for some very choppy waters. Now this projection could be wrong. And believe me, I hope it is. History has shown us that through every other recession and depression people still needed to be entertained. So…studios faired pretty damn well. At sometimes even showing a surge in profit! But according to this Variety article I’m going to link you to, that doesn’t seem to be the case this time around.

LINK: Industry braces for recession impact

I just can’t seem to shake off this feeling that in the next 10 years we’re going to see a dramatic increase in the number of major visual effects studios moving to foreign countries for cheaper labor. And all the little studios out there won’t be able to will just go belly up.

The signs seem to be written on the wall. We already have ILM in Singapore. Sony Pictures Imageworks and Rhythm & Hues in Mumbia. And now even Hyderbad because of ‘a cheaper cost of living’. Countless other studios are opening up offices in Canada as well. So it’s looking more and more likely that if you want to be a visual effects artist in feature films, you better be fine with immigrating into another country. And that’s taking the whole ‘willing to relocate’ part of our resumes to a whole new and unwanted level.

Pretty depressing post huh? Well that’s kind of my mood today. At least about the state of the world and this job that I love to do. I guess it’s only appropriate to quote Terminator and say, “hay el venir de la tormenta”. Because there is indeed a storm coming. We can’t ignore it any longer. So bunker down the hatches fellow artists. And hopefully I’m just really really wrong about this one.

UPDATE:

Jess told me that this post was WAY too depressing, so hopefully this will bring some happy into it…

Did that work?

spi spire

VFXWorld published an article about the work Sony Pictures Imageworks did on the Chicago Spire, that I wrote about a month or so ago. It has an interview with the Director of the spot, Sheena Duggal, and she talks about her inspirations and technical challenges the good team over at SPI took on. It’s a good read so check it out!

LINK: Imageworks Gets Inspired by Chicago Spire