Ford Fiesta - Zeitgeist

Says Dan Seddon, Head of 3D, Commercials, "It was an inversion of the normal process from our point of view: all of the hardest work and most of our man-hours took place on the pre-viz, with the post-shoot phase being relatively straightforward. Apart from making sure that the shoot schedule was feasible, the pre-viz was an opportunity for the director and creatives to change their minds - because there wouldn't be time to do that on location. So there was a fair bit of R&D on the best techniques to use. Noah had done tests on a building roof, moving 2 or 3 laptops around and shooting them with a stills camera, giving a rough idea of the effect he was after. Initially we thought that because it was a very rhythmic movement with boxes lying on top of each other, it might all be done procedurally rather than key framed, since key framing something on this scale seemed too daunting at that point. Meanwhile, our animators were coming up with cycles, and these turned out very well indeed, so we ended up building it up out of those. Once we'd got an edit sorted out, we created a stop motion version of the whole thing in Maya."

The shoot took place in Berlin over 12 nights at the beginning of July this year, supervised by O'Brien. "We numbered the TVs on the pre-viz and on the back of the real TVs," recalls O'Brien, "And we gave the animators a 'playbook' containing every single frame to be shot, so they'd know exactly where to place the TV for each set-up. It worked out at around two minutes per frame to move the TVs - it was a military operation, basically."

With the shoot over, the 3D team's work continued with TD Michele Fabbro lighting the CG televisions to match their real counterparts. In addition, the laborious task of tracking the material (using Boujou) was led by TD Jabed Khan. "We spent a lot more time on tracking than we might normally do because it had to be so dead on," says Seddon, "You had these very rigid geometric objects sitting on top of each other, some of which were 3D some of which were real, and it would be very easy to see if they became misaligned. In addition, not only were we going to be adding 3D televisions, but we were also providing the locators for our Smoke artists (led by O'Brien and Tim Greenwood) to put the footage on the real TVs. It was a great example of 3D and 2D teams working together, because the material we exported directly into Smoke meant that Paul didn't have to do 2D hand tracks and therefore saved considerable time and effort." O'Brien agrees, "As well as facilitating the TV placement, the 3D tracking data proved invaluable when the (inevitable) rain during a couple of the shots meant that we had to replace a road. It was a great way to work."