Audi: Trick or Treat

About a month ago my boss asked me to do a little research on the night vision camera that came as an optional feature in the new A6. Our ever so popular CEO was kind enough to loan us his new A7 for an afternoon to do some test shots. It was a little nerve wracking being responsible for the safety of my bosses bosses bosses car, but still, fun was had and things were learned.

Test image shot with an Audi

Turns out the Audi Night vision camera is a thermal imaging camera. Rather than try to hunt down a thermal camera and try to fake it, we opted to shoot the dashboard straight on. Since we were going to be shooting from the inside of a car, space was an issue and we opted to shoot on an EPIC and use the extra resolution to fake the scripted camera move in post. It turns out, however, that it's really easy to replace the space an epic doesn't take up with some nice glass.

We shot the spot in a lovely little neighborhood just passed downtown San Rafael during and just after sunset. Since we were only shooting the dash, lighting wasn't an issue. There were however 2 technical challenges we ran into. The first was that as it got later it was hard to keep the kids, and more frustratingly their costumes, warm enough to read clearly on the display. We got around this by having someone just out of frame warm each kid up with a hair dryer right before walking. The second hurdle was the far less challenging task of organizing and directing 14 kids under the age of ten. Apparently they don't take direction well when tired and cold. Who knew?

When all was said and done we had 3 days for post on this peace. It was edited by our new (no longer intern) associate editor, Julie Logan. I helped out with some shot stabilization and comped dials that were in focus into the shots. But other than that, everything you see on the display is the car itself.

The piece was only supposed to be a youtube/hulu pre-roll spot, but upon viewing an almost complete version, our client decided they wanted us to finish for broadcast. To the best of my knowledge, it ran during a couple football games and possibly during a world series game. We also got a lovely write up on AgencySpy

Kinect Sports: Season 2

xbox.com/kinectsports

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.

Works best in Firefox.

Youtube: April Fools 2011

This year for April Fools Day, Youtube decided they were going to celebrate their 100th anniversary. My office was tasked with promoting the momentous occasion as well as providing some of its highlighted content. My task was to produce the Top 5 Videos of 1911 (the year that youtube first started hosting videos on the internet). Here's what my team and I came up with.

Kinect: Fun That's Good for You!

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 several projects over the years 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.

The End of 2010

It's been a good long while since I last updated and I figure it's time for a quick update. I'm just now realizing that my last post was in June of last year and I can hardly believe it's been 9 months since. It feels like a few weeks.

So shortly after wrapping Alan Wake up, I was brought onto the Target account to help create a video that summed up their new "My Target Weekly" site. I spent a few days storyboarding this out, and then went straight into animation. My co-workers Jake and Tori helped out with some Cinema4d animation for the opening shot of the leaflet opening up.



I worked on the MTW demo video from August until the beginning September when yet again the Target team briefed me on the upcoming Target 2 Day shoot. This was a whole shoot built around promoting the countdown site for Target's 2 day holiday (The Blackest of Fridays) sale. For whatever reason most of the stuff we made never saw the light of day, but the shoot by far the most memorable I've ever been on. Here's a few of my favorite pics:


Our fearless Director: Enno Jacobsen


Director of Photography: Roman Jakobi




(for those who don't know, those are the formulas used to determine depth of field. 2 guesses as to what he does)



September ran right on into October, which was extremely busy for me cuz I got married, and then immediately went to New Zealand. Then I came back and immediately worked on 2 pitches (one of which we won!) over the next 3 weeks, until desperatly needing yet another week off. And my last official act of 2010 was to shoot my new Nephew's first christmas.

So that was the last quarter of 2010 for me, and while I thought that was as busy as I'd ever been, recent events suggest it was only the tip of the ice burg.

Pandora ROVR

Back in October I was approached by several of my co-workers with the notion of creating a video along the lines of the intro to the movie Contact or Powers of 10. The video was to become the intro to a portion of the McDonalds / Avatar online promotional efforts.



The intro tells the tale of the first mission to Pandora. You travel from Earth, past Polyphemus and several of it's moons to just above Pandora and see the first exploration rover descending towards the surface of the planet. Once the intro finishes you are given the opportunity to explore the jungles of Pandora.

I did all of the 3D and Comping work for this piece. The planets were done in maya using textures from planetpixelemporium.com. The piece was finished in After Effects using Knoll Light Factory for the stars, and Particular for the flames around the pod as it hits Pandora's atmosphere.

As with the movie, it took MANY people making contributions to pull this site together. I was a huge undertaking and for some on the team represents more than an year and a half of work to push this one out the door.

You can visit the ROVR experience here.

Halo: ODST

xbox.com/halo

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.

Halo Wars

Look upon the war torn planet of Harvest. This experience site gives you the point of view for both the Human and Covenant sides in the Halo universe.

http://halo.xbox.com/halowars

My role in this was creating the planet itself in Maya and creating the transitions to the surface which had to seamlessly flow into actual footage captured from the game itself.

Gears 2 Award Site

It's always good to finally be far enough removed from a project you worked on so closely to see the whole picture and realize that it's something you're really proud of. I had a moment like that today when the Awards submission site for the Gears of War 2 project I worked on went live. It has a campaign overview video that I cut together on it, as well as clips and links to the various pieces of the puzzle and the experience site itself.

You can check out the Award Site here.

Gears of War 2: The Last Day

The Last Day is an experiential website that takes you through a destroyed city on the day that humanity burrows underground to fight The Locust. Viewed from the point of view of JACK, Marcus Fenix's companion robot, who awakens to find himself in the midst of destruction.

This project probably pushed me farther out on a limb than I've ever been before. Reason being that we were tasked with creating the entire experience with in game graphics, and that we were going to have to build all of our assets with the Unreal 3 development engine. As the only member of my team with any real experience doing any kind of 3d production I was picked to receive training.

I spent a week training Alex Okita at Black Point Studios in SOMA. After 5 days of intense learning I came back to my office and over the next month built all the navigational assets for the site and provided assets to several other artists to be assembled into various content pieces for the site.

The environment in the site is a manipulated version of a previously assembled level. The bulk of my time was spent rearranging and retexturing objects, re-lighting the scene, and animating the camera. Another mandate was that we never show a "still frame", meaning that every time the camera stopped on an object there had to be a looping background video available. All in all there are 26 stopping points.

My two favorite shots from this project are the final lockup of the sunset and the reflection of JACK in the side of the van in a pile of rubble. The sunset was a favorite because It involved a fair amount of polishing after we got a render out of the unreal engine. The reflection is a favorite because in involved a fair amount of roto and matchmoving to get it to look right. Below I've posted a video of the complete fly through without any of the programatic distortion that was done in flash.



There's more content pieces and shot breakdowns to come, but for now I'd recommend that everyone should get the full experience and check out the site.

Gears of War: Emergence Day

My work here was part of the experiential site for the first Gears of War game. In this site you're looking through the eyes of Marcus Fenix who's in jail remembering the events that led him to being incarcerated through a series of cryptic flashbacks.

This was my first project where I was leading the video production. This could have something to do with the fact that I was the only guy doing any of the video production work, but I like to think that's cuz they wanted to give me a trial by fire.

My task was to create videos for the 4 different flashbacks. This was very much a precursor project to the Iris work I did for Halo 3, in that I was given a selection of stock footage, game footage, and a dev kit to capture more game footage from. What I couldn't get from that wound up either being quickly made in Maya or got composited together from high res concept art.

One of the cool things about this project is that Epic Games gave us the entire sound library from the game. So when you're hearing the sound effects and the Locust are screaming at you, you're actually hearing what you would hear in the game. The VO is mostly made up of talent we pulled from our office, with a few choice tracks of Marcus and Dom scattered throughout.









I spent 2 weeks on this project. The last 4 days were spent working without sleep, at the end of which my body just about gave up on me and I came down with what is to date the worst cold/flu/debilitating sick feeling I've ever had. I actually tried to come in and keep working but was turned away with the same kind of regard people used to give to leper. I took the hint and ended up relinquishing the last few corrections of work to my good friend Caio who added the finishing touches to the gritty masking effect and handed off final assets to the developers.

AKQA: Woof

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.

Halo 3: Believe

http://www.halo3.com/believe



Immediately following the work I did on the IRIS campaign I started getting briefed on Believe. This was to be the experiential site that was going to accompany a larger TV campaign. The Agency in charge of the TV spots had commissioned New Deal Studios to build a 30x40 foot diorama of the Battle of New Mombasa (where Master Chief saved the day... yet again) which was populated with several hundred figurines made by Stan Winston Studios.

The whole thing was shot on 2 motion control rigs over 2 days. The footage was then stitched together and had the sky roto'd out.

My involvement was doing the sky replacement (including learning how to do 3d tracking with no prior experience), roto for the various rotating characters that appear when you click one of the floating icons, and the motion tracking for all the clickable hotspots in the timeline.

CREDITS:
Executive Creative Director: Rei Inamoto
Creative Director: John Jakubowski
Associate Creative Director: Thiago Zanato Tripodi
Creative Lead: Hoj Jomehri
Art Director: Kevin Hsieh
Copywriters: Joel Kaplan/ Keith Hostert
Creative Developer: Jason Gatt
Title Sequence: Caio Lazzuri
Senior Designer: Alex Lyman
Motion Designer: Matt Law
Associate Motion Designer: Rian Devos
Producer: Nancy Cardillo/ Larry Ewing
Senior Technical Project Manager: Kirk Kepley
Group Account Director: Simon Jefferson
Account Director: Erica Power
Senior Account Executive: Nicole Biondi
Diorama: New Deal Studios (Director - Matt Gratzner)
Figurines: Stan Winston Studio
Sound Design: Richard Devine

The Together Experience

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.

Shot_01


Shot_02


Visit the site here

The vast majority of the videos produced for this site were done by Jeremiah Wassom and Stefan Belavy.

Jeremiah's site:
http://www.freakinrad.com/

Stefan's site:
http://www.technosoul.com/

Halo 3: Iris

Iris is one of my favorite projects I've ever worked on.  By the time it got to me the idea and structure had been flushed out but all I got was "we're going to make an ARG, it will be long and complicated, and at the end of each part we want there to be a video being played through an alien server."

When they asked for that they had no idea what anything was going to look like. The server, the environment it was housed in, and the video itself were all up for grabs.  So I along with my immediate supervisor set about designing the actual servers themselves.  We each came up with 4 different designs, and internally decided on 1 that could be subtly modified and repeated to create 5 different servers.  Mine didn't get chosen which meant I was tasked with the rest of the materials needed to make the servers.

This turned out to be the best job I could have ever hoped for.  I wound up being put in charge of all the environments that the servers would be housed in as well as all of the content videos that would play when the user figured out which symbol to click on.

There were Five in total.  For the most part they were edited with Final Cut Pro, and tweaked, colored, and effected in After Effects.  When the videos called for assets that couldn't be bought as stock footage, or shot locally, I wound up doing some work in Maya to fill in the gaps.

Below are the 5 videos:

Server 1

Server 2

Server 3

Server 4

Server 5