Electrolux Deconstructed

DDB along with director Marcus Nispel enlisted the CG and Flame contingents of Smoke & Mirrors to create the illusions in the latest installment of the Electrolux campaign starring Kelly Ripa.  Touting the speed of Electrolux's washers and dryers, the spot shows Kelly's laundry soaring into her appliances and then falling back into drawers completely folded.  Meanwhile her husband summons a candle-lit dinner from thin air with the flick of a table cloth.  

This table cloth shot required the CG team to provide a nuanced animation of suspended flatware falling gracefully into place on the table.  To help the agency creatives settle on the "look" of the falling flatware, the CG team provided them with several animation concepts illustrating how the dishware might make contact with the table.  

From this test, the agency chose an animation concept and the CG team refined the animation details. The CG team then utilized their expert tracking skills to seamlessly incorporate the animation into the live-action shot.  After creating the proper render passes, these were delivered to the S&M Flame team to composite into the final shot.  See breakdown below.

Maryland Lottery Deconstructed :: Part 3 :: Populating the Stadium

ICE tree for bespoke crowd duplication program

To populate the stadium with 80,000 screaming fans, SMNY's R&D team wrote a bespoke program in XSI based on particle systems.  Replacing the particles with the pre-shot green screen footage, the team's program provided for randomized placement of the various fans as well as  for randomized playback of the clips to allow for variation in the stands (see image right).

50 particles in <1 second / 500 particles in approx 1 second / 40,000 particles in approx 4 seconds

This flexible system allows for crowd duplication across any piece of geometry.  Fast as well as flexible, the particle-based system program generates 40,000 "fans" in less than 84seconds.

the turquoise patches tell the program where to fill the geometry with particles

To control the placement and concentration of the fans, the team incorporated into the program the ability to paint on the geometry to direct the particles on where to populate.  Rendering the entire scene to portray a realistic but stylized look that heavily incorporated the Baltimore Ravens colors (purple & gold) yielded the final result:

Maryland Lottery Deconstructed :: Part 2 :: Creating the Fans

The next step for the S&M CG team was to create the fans with which to fill newly modeled and textured stadium. To do this, S&M's TD directed a green screen shoot at Smoke & Mirrors where he captured several S&M employees acting as crazed fans.  

green screen shoot

With several clips of cheering fans, the footage was brought into Flame to key out the green screen.  

keying out the green

With several clips of crazy fans, the R&D team's next challenge was to develop a method of populating the stadium model with them.  To find out how the CG team progressed from green screen to packed stadium, check back on Wednesday September 8.

Maryland Lottery Deconstructed :: Part 1 :: Model & Texture

This most recent spot for the Maryland lottery was a unique challenge for the Smoke & Mirrors CG team.  A 5-commercial campaign, each spot features an exuberant fan singing Broadway-style about a prize he or she won and finishes with an animated end shot of M&T bank stadium filled with cheering fans.  Tasked with creating this end shot under a very tight deadline, there was not time to fully model, texture, light and render the stadium and then fill it with cheering fans, so the team devised a clever work-around.

wireframe model of stadium

model textured with photographs of actual stadium

One member of the S&M CG team traveled to Baltimore to photograph the M&T  Bank Stadium.  Using the exact perspective and focal length from those images, the team created a low-res model of the stadium (see image to the left) that was then textured using those images (see image below).

With a textured model of M&T Bank Stadium in place, the next hurdle for the S&M CG team was to fill the stadium with thousands of cheering fans.  Check back on Tuesday September 7, 2010 to find out more about how they populated the stadium with 80,000 cheering fans in under 4 seconds.