Promo Site my team and I worked on for the launch of Kinect Sports Season 2.
Jake Hawley, Tori Main, and Danny O. on 3d and Motion graphics for the station indents. Mindy McCutchen and Intern Julie (who was thrown straight into the deep end with this one) on editorial. I did the motion for the various pop-up windows and lower 3rds along with all the green screen work.
First big project of the new year was the first round of post-launch promotions we were doing for the Xbox: Kinect. The project was called "Fun That's Good for You" and it centered around a young woman playing the various Kinect titles. As she plays various elements from the games appear around her.
I've done this sort of thing before. There've been severalprojectsovertheyears I've worked on that involved people interacting with elements from Xbox titles. What made this one special was that I was tasked with handeling the project from pre-pro all the way through to final compositing and international localization. Almost instantly this went from "one more compositing job" to "Directorial Debut".
We shot the whole thing against white at Studio 1550 in the Dogpatch.
We used a RED ONE with the Mysterium censor and a set of Arriflex Primes from Chater Camera over in Berkeley (seen here with our DP Steve Condiotti).
After the shoot, I was all on my own for post production. I had a few days to get all five of the edits done and then about a week and a half for compositing and finishing. 3d was all done in Maya. Since most of the shots that involved direct contact with the objects were very brief, I matched the animation by hand. We used green sticks for placement reference which helped a lot for the javelin shot.
Everything not done in Maya was in After Effects. This included lots of tracked type and a generous helping of Particular.
Overall, I learned a lot from the experience. I learned that being able to point out flaws in a shot during post in no way makes you capable of avoiding them during production. I also learned just how helpful it can be to have an accurate camera report. And most importantly, I learned that I really enjoy directing. The day was hectic, but the fun kind of hectic, and I hope to get more opportunities like this in the coming months.
For now, you can check out the finished project here.
After the success of the Believe and Iris campaigns a few years back, along with Gears of War 2 last year, Xbox once again tasked my office with doing the online marketing for their next AAA title: Halo ODST. In this game you play as the rookie on a squad of Orbital Drop Shock Troopers (get it?) as you make your way through a myriad of levels killing aliens, saving humanity, and blah, blah, every first person shooter you've ever played.
While the game itself may play out like Halo 3.5, the site and production that went into it took our team marching into all sorts of brave new territories. The site revolves around an interface which allows the user to review interview footage of the 3 members of the ODST team you fight alongside in the game. During each interview, the soldiers are instructed to put a device on their head that allows you to see what they're thinking.
The interviews were shot on a sound stage in LA and were later matched up with b-roll, shot in both Budapest and SF. My role in all of this was to work alongside my co-worker and friend Jeremiah Wassom, and support his effort to assemble the video feeds of the thoughts / memories. Since he'd been brought into the project earlier and was on-set in Budapest his role was to ensure the interview questions matched up with the memories we'd planned on producing.
While he was laying out time lines and establishing timing, I took over the visual effects work for individual shots that would be part of these memories. initially we'd planned on having 4 shots, only 1 of which was anticipated to involve 3d motion tracking and animating game models.
By the end of the project we had 10 vfx shots, 5 of which involved some tricky matchmoving, and 3 of those included animating models from the game into the shots. In all of these cases, I tracked the shots using PFTrack, animated and textured some of the game assets in Maya, and composited it all together in After Effects.
Pelican
Tribute
Covenant Sky
Probably the most complicated of the shots I worked on was the Banshee Attack. While initially this shot seemed to be an easy track, it turned out to be an incredibly difficult shot. In fact, due to a crazy exposure shift and the smoke that felt it had the right to casually waft through the shot, I never actually tracked the entire shot in one continuous take. Instead the shot was broken into 2 parts, before and after the banshee explodes. The explosion was done using footage from Detonation Films, and the rocket and contrails were done using Trapcode Particular.
Banshee Attack
The shot was later cut down to accommodate client request (and cover up the fact we had nothing for him to be shooting at when the camera panned back down).
After individual shots were finished and placed into their respective timelines they were treated with a process that jeremiah came up with to scramble them up and add that digital noise that's so indicative of a scrambled digital signal.
the last step of the project was to animate the various EKG / Brain activity meters that needed to reflect the soldiers stress levels as related to their memories.
At the end of the day, this turned out to be the kind of project I love. I got my hands dirty doing things like shooting extra assets and making a bomb (turns out everything I know about explosives comes from the Die Hard Movies), I pulled just about every compositing trick I could think of out of my hat. and walked away with a whole bunch of work I'm really proud of.
These are a selection of clips from the 2006 AKQA holiday card that I worked on. This was a very short project, but was a lot of fun.
We shot the various office dogs against a white background and then got to come up with a number of ways to kill them. the hardest part of all of this actually turned out to be finding a loop-able chunk of footage for each of the dogs we worked with(except for Chad, he's a consummate professional).
I was responsible for doing everything for the various 3d elements in the shots, and once that was done I got to do full assembly for the Anvil shot (which has been my favorite shot since the initial concept).
The rest of the shots were assembled by Caio Lazzuri.
Jojo_anvil
Chad_Lasers
Chad_Lightning
Mika_Abducted
One last note: I strongly recommend checking out the site the clips I have don't have the final audio and the Anvil shot comes alive when the sound is on.
This was another project for Xbox. It involved a lot of actors drawing illustrated objects in the air. The bulk of my involvement in this project was in the planning stages to figure out the most effective way to achieve the drawing effect given the limited in house resources and budget available to us.
The method we decided on was to do point tracking in after effects and use Trapcode Particular to emit a trail of particles for the line writing. For some of the larger objects in the site we just made the trails wider and used them to mask on pre composed objects and type.
In the end I wound up only producing 2 of the final shots (seen below). Both shots are for idol loops that play when the site has been sitting undisturbed for a bout a minute or so. These are only 2 of about 12 that were embedded in the final sight. So if you're looking for these in the actual site, it may take a while.
