Zoic Studios creative director and visual effects supervisor Leslie Ekker tells fxguide about integrating World of Warcraft game characters into a live-action market for a spot showcasing Mountain Dew’s new ‘Game Fuel’ drink.

Watch The Mountain Dew new Game Fuel drink Spot 6M QuickTime

fxg: How did you get started on this 'Level Up or Die' spot?

Leslie: : We were contacted by the agency, BBDO NY, first. Amy Werthheimer was the producer. Amy knew me from my days at Digital Domain, where I'd spent 10 years supervising effects on commercials. She heard that I'd come to Zoic. So she contacted me and sent us the boards. She told us one the directors they were considering was Tarsem Singh at radical.media. We were very excited to have this opportunity because we enjoy doing character animation and we were looking for more of that kind of work. We have done a lot of games cinematics through our game division. We had worked before with Blizzard, who make World of Warcraft, so they were very comfortable with us.

fxg: What was the first thing you did after receiving the boards?

Leslie: Because the characters were based on the packaging labels of the product - which had a Night Elf and an Orc - they were pre-determined. We had to acquire them from Blizzard as digital assets and animate them for the spot. One of the first things we did was contact Blizzard to find out what was involved in importing these characters and getting them ready for animation.


fxg: How did you go about getting them as digital files?

Leslie: Well, it was difficult. We first got the models of the characters. They were quite different from each other. The Night Elf was quite developed, a very beautiful model with great textures. Unfortunately the setup was in 3d Studio Max and we don't work in the platform, so we had to convert this to Maya, which meant re-doing it from scratch. The Night Elf was very complex because she has a number of features of her physique that are challenging, including cloth simulation, hair sim, pendulous strings and feathers.

For the Orc, we found out that it was actually a very old model created by a guy who was no longer at the company. The textures were partial and the setup and rigging was non-existent. So we had to ask Blizzard if they had anything more usable, and they found another Orc which was nearly identical. He had wonderful textures - it was a gorgeous model. We still had to re-build the model with extra dynamics and cloth simulation and physics simulations.



fxg: What was shot for the commercial?

Leslie: We had an extensive meeting with Tarsem, Blizzard, the agency and the production company over at radical.media. We covered a lot of points. Among them, Tarsem went through what shots he would need to cover the story. He's a very capable director and had a really solid plan as to how this would be executed in terms of the shot designs. What I had to do was determine what would be necessary in the shoot - clean plates, reference passes, stunt men, greenscreen - all of those things may or may not be needed in situations like this.

We decided to animate these characters using performance capture, so the fight choreography became important to determine early on. Tarsem brought a fight co-ordinator in and they worked out the choreography that could be edited in various ways. This fight sequence made it obvious that we would have to have our stunt performers on set. We would shoot them going through their moves on the scene, and when we got something that Tarsem liked, we would then shoot clean plates of the background without the actors. This would make it possible to animate the characters and composite them into the scenes without the complexity of painting out the stuntmen. It was still necessary to paint them out in scenes where physical interaction was necessary.



fxg: Because they hit a bunch of boxes and things occasionally...

Leslie: Exactly - they crash through a wall of boxes. They crash a counter-top detail and they smash a bottle of milk and a carton of eggs. It was complex in a couple of shots because there's flying debris and spray from the milk, but it was doable. The stuntmen provided really invaluable reference to timing and placement and reference to the animation.



fxg: How did the nature of the fluorescent lighting impact on your work?

Leslie: Because HDRs don't cast shadows on surfaces, we had to simulate that particular kind of shadow that long lines of fluorescent bulbs give you. They're kind of repeated stripey shadows that change orientation depending on the shadow-casting object. So you'll see scenes where the shadows change quality as the character swings an arm through an arc. That's the manifestation of the weird complexity of long stripes of these lights.

We take HDR photographs to capture all of the shoot lighting. We also capture reflection and shadow environments. We also did some set surveying to reconstruct the environment in the computer. This allows us to cast shadows on the sides of counter-tops and have 3D mattes for some of the geography of the market.

The other level of complexity it brought was the difficulty of making something look photoreal in ugly light. It doesn't give a range of tones or specular highlights or deep shadows. It was very flat lighting. So we pushed it a little bit more. There was some contrast in the plates - not necessarily shadow plates - but we pushed the lighting to give us a little more range so the surfaces would be more descriptive.



fxg: Can you talk about the performance capture aspect of the animation?

Leslie: We met on stage for about three-quarters of a day at House of Moves. They have a beautiful setup for performance capture. Tarsem's team brought props - the stick sword and the magic wand - and they put some tracking markers on them. The team obviously also wore tracking suits. We laid out objects in the performance capture stage that simulated the size and position of the counter-tops and the isles where the scenes were happening, to make sure they wouldn't penetrate into the counter-tops themselves.

I also scaled all of those objects down vertically in height because our stunt performers were 5"4, and our animated characters were about 7" tall. So when a character who's 5"4 swings a sword at shoulder level, that's a 7" person bending over and swinging a sword. So I scaled everything by about 20 per cent, which yielded an action zone that was scaled properly for the performance of the stuntmen.


fxg: What did you end up with after the performance capture?

Leslie: We had motion files that were used to drive the animation. We parented them to the rig of each character in Maya. They required very little editing. We would move a shoulder here and there, but mostly because of the height issues. We would shift the timing sometimes, or simplify some jittery moves, which were probably real but didn't look so great on a large character.

In some cases we changed the forward motion of the characters to better fit the time and motion of the stuntmen. The last shot of the commercial features the Orc running through the debris of boxes he's knocked over, and the Orc can run much faster than our 5"4 stuntman. So four steps of an Orc equals about eight steps of a stuntman. So we held the Orc back a bit. Luckily we couldn't see his legs because of the angle of the camera, so it felt like he was slipping and tripping over the boxes and worked out quite well.



fxg: How did you achieve the cloth animation?
Leslie: We used nCloth, which is a plug-in for Maya. We still had to work hard to make it look convincing because there are several types of cloth involved for these characters. The Orc has strips of leather as a kilt, and underneath that a piece of hard leather. He also has chains with leather straps around his neck, and other trimmings. And he has a pony-tail and eyebrows that are fuzzy and dark. We used Shave and a Haircut, another Maya plug-in, to animate the hair.

For the Night Elf, we used the same hair and cloth simulator, but she had different challenges because her quilted skirt has heavy fabric but with bouncing and flagging. Then her hair had to be very silky and glamorous and shiny and colourful. It took quite a few iterations to make that feel right. She also had a lot of little pendants, thongs on her wand and feathers on her shoulders that all had to be simulated. The feathers were driven with a particle system so they all had the right amount of delay and weight.



fxg: How did you accomplish the effects shots in the spot, like the energy blasts and when the camera is splashed with milk?

Leslie: It does actually get splashed with real milk! So you can imagine compositing through that. The lens is smothered in milk and you have droplets running through the frame. We did some clever things to separate the background from the milk, and we added more splashes on top of it. We created a special particle animation system that simulated the milk quite closely and we rotoscoped as much of the milk as possible from the original plate, while still removing our greenscreen suited stuntman.

In the case of the blast of energy coming out of the Night Elf's wand, we created that using an effects animation plug-in for After Effects. It's based on particle effects and quite configurable. I designed with our compositor a look for the effect of the lights around the bottles at the end of the spot. Blizzard liked that quite a lot, so they asked us to design something based on that for the Night Elf's blast. In the game, the effects are generally quite simplistic. We were trying to do something that felt a lot more dynamic and dangerous - more powerful and frightening. I started with lightning and added that magical colourful cloud effect. Then we added a lot of optical distortion around the effect in the background because I wanted it to feel like it was bending space. So you'll see a real bubble warp around the weapon as it goes by the background. The whole frame sort of 'burbles'.

We also rendered special passes of lighting that would front-illuminate the Orc and the Elf when the blast was near them, for a realistic lighting effect. I also asked our compositor to create interactive reflections and illumination on the location surrounding the geography.

You'll also notice some residual magical effects on the Orc as he crashes through the scene and rolls around. He's still got a bit of electrical energy crawling over him. We did that partly because we had this great performance from the stuntman when he rolled around in pain. It was never intended - it was something of a surprise - so I wanted to give him a reason to be rolling around.





fxg: What did you use to composite the spot?

Leslie: It was entirely done in After Effects. We did a little bit of Flame work right at the end for polishing and developing post moves. We did some zooms, pans and camera shakes in the Flame just to bring a little more life into the plates. The plates were all lock-offs, which made things much easier, but it does suck some life out of the piece. I was anxious to bring some of that camera life back into it.



fxg: The characters seem very well integrated into this unusual and unlikely scene.

Leslie: Our brief from Blizzard was that we needed to create characters that were a bit better than cinematic quality. We wanted to make them feel like they were actually in the room. If you're looking at the commercial and thinking: "Check out the animation of those characters in the market" instead of thinking "Look at those guys in the market" then you're taken out of the story and it's too much of a distraction. My goal was to elicit a "Holy shit!" response and not a "Oh, interesting work" one.