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: 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.

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.