Animation computer language movie

NAB '98 spotlights spot work created with the latest CGI software.

This year's National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) show will offer a panoply of product demonstrations, and some of the most interesting will feature examples of cutting-edge commercial work executed with the latest in computer graphics and animation software. To get an idea of what's new at the show and to illustrate the potential of current versions of particular software tools, SHOOT spoke to a sampling of artists whose 3-D animation and visual effects work will be on hand.

Escape Artist

Floyd Gillis, owner/animator of New York-based AFCG, Inc., an animation house that works out of The Tape House digital facility, will demonstrate the capabilities of Side Effects Houdini at the Silicon Graphics booth. In two presentations, he will discuss how he utilized the software to execute 3-D animation and effects in a number of spots, including Starburst's "Lifeguard" for M&M/Mars via Grey Advertising, New York, which first aired in the summer of 1997.

In the spot, a lifeguard gets a boost of energy from a package of Starburst candy and dives into an exotic underwater world of mermaids and swimming fruit. Live action of the lifeguard and the mermaids - shot by Rob Lopes of The Lopes Picture Company, New York - was combined with a CGI underworld environment created completely with Houdini version 2.04. Gillis, who works closely with New York-based Tape House Digital Film (director of special effects for the company, Michel Suissa, was visual effects supervisor on the spot), made use of a number of the software's cutting-edge features.

"We rotoscoped the mermaids and lifeguard so that they were interacting with the fruit and its animation," Gillis explains. "This was especially true in the first shot where a mermaid comes through a school of strawberries and lemons; there is a lot of interaction between her arms and tail and the school of fruit. There are other shots where the motion of the tail of the mermaid and the arms of the lifeguard are doing different things to the fruit as well. To do this, we used Houdini's particle systems with exterior forces for flocking-like effects."

The software was also used to create animated underwater textures. "We actually projected light through animated textures that were generated in Houdini to create an underwater look with bright and dark areas, and waves and ripples landing on the strawberries and lemons. This was to integrate the fruit elements with the live action, which was shot with underwater lighting effects," Gillis says. "We also used Interactive Effects' Amazon paint system to generate some of the textures."

Also on "Lifeguard," Discreet Logic Flame was used for final composite of the CGI elements with the live action. "In most cases, we do the final composite ourselves within Houdini," Gillis says. "We use Flame when there is a lot of client interaction. Often they like to play around with the footage."

He added that having all of these procedural capabilities - modeling, animation, rotoscoping, particle effects and compositing - all in the same package is the biggest advantage of the software. The result is a very interactive and creative set of tools.

"What stands out the most for me is the whole procedural design of Houdini," he says. "We're able to build an environment with a lot of variables built in. Then during the review or when the client is present, we're able to change one little factor and that will cascade down to a lot of the other objects, and automatically update them."

Faster Pussycat

Among the goodies Puffin Designs will show at NAB '98 to demo its Commotion software includes work produced by New York-based 89 Design, the graphics and design arm of 89 Greene Editorial. According to Steve Marino, director of design/graphics at 89, he is beta testing Commotion version l.l, and has recently used the software for a number of spots including NEC Computer Product's "Fastest," via Hampel/Stefanides, New York.

"Fastest," which first aired in December 1997, presents shots of the fastest train in the world, plus the fastest skier, plane and rodeo roundup to introduce the new and fast NEC Direction DPL 266 computer. The commercial features product shots directed by Greg Ramsey of Celsius Films, New York, edited together with stock footage by Bruce Ashley of 89 Greene Editorial, which - working in tandem with 89 Design - kept most of the postproduction inhouse. Cleaning up and transitioning between stock footage and graphic design were all executed in the Apple Macintosh environment using Avid Media Composer, Adobe After Effects, Photoshop and Illustrator. Puffin Design's Commotion was used to clean up the stock-footage sequences.

"Most of the live action was stock footage and what we had to do was provide cool transitions between the scenes," Marino recalls. "We used After Effects for blur transitions between footage. The footage, however, was from all over the place, so some of it - the cheetah scene in particular - was a complete mess. It was old footage and was full of film dirt and scratches. So we had to remove all of that. If you saw a before and after, you wouldn't recognize it; it came out very well. Commotion is primarily a rotoscoping, rig removal and retouching software. We went to town on the stock footage and it came out looking like a million bucks."

Since they are beta testing the software, Marino says, they have just scraped the surface in terms of Commotion's capabilities. What he asserts, however, is that Commotion has brought a new level of productivity to 89 Design's work.

"Using Commotion in conjunction with After Effects gives us a painting module that After Effects doesn't have," Marino says. "They have filled a void with this software. Otherwise, to do paint and retouching, people would have to access Photoshop from inside After Effects and go in and clean up dirt frame by frame. We didn't have this as a resource before. It enables us to get into new areas, such as rotospline and paint animation. It's almost like having a Flame on the desktop."

Do It Yourself

What Mark Voelpel, director of CGI at R/Greenberg & Associates in New York, finds to be most advantageous about Softimage|3D is its extensiveness. The 3-D modeling and animation software allows animators and effects artists to write proprietary software that extends the software's capabilities.

"We've had a CGI department here at R/GA since 1984 and back then you had to write your own software, and so that's what we did," Voelpel says. "Now, you can buy software like Softimage, but we still have the expertise to write software. We use some of our own proprietary software as custom tools that we add as plug-ins. Softimage is very friendly to writing one's own custom tools that do specifically what you need to do."

A number of examples of R/GA's work will be demonstrated at Microsoft/Softimage's NAB exhibit, including two fully computer-generated spots out of J. Walter Thompson, Atlanta, which are airing nationally in spring 1998 to introduce a virtual spokesperson for Orkin. According to Voelpel, who directed the two spots, "Orkin Man" and "Stampede," R/GA created the spots completely in Softimage version 3.7, writing plug-ins to execute elements for both.

"For 'Orkin Man' we wrote software for the simulation of cloth to create waving curtains on the window," Voelpel says. "In 'Stampede,' we wrote a translucency shader for Softimage's renderer Mental Ray to make termites look translucent."

In "Orkin Man," the superhero comes to save the day as a bunch of toys (a cymbal-clanging monkey, giraffe, robot, baseball player, plastic pull-toy and excitable jack-in-the-box) are distraught when an errant cockroach scurries though their midst. "Stampede" opens in a stylized western town, atop a wooden workbench in a suburban basement at dusk. When a gang of termites arrives on the scene, Orkin Man swaggers in to calm a bunch of wooden toys.

"Our approach to the Orkin spot, as to any commercial, is that it is a 30-second movie," Voelpel says. "It tells a story, it has a plot, it has a climax that uses film language and it uses all the aspects of cinema such as editing, lighting and camera movement. It's using the language of film to tell a story, get a mood across and draw an emotional response from the viewer."

Voelpel notes that Softimage is part and parcel of this storytelling process, expecially when it comes to developing strong character animation.