We recently featured The Mill’s TVC work for a series of DirecTV marionette spots (see our coverage here). Now, fxinsiders can read about two other recent Mill and Mill+ projects – commercials for AutoZone Duralast and for Gatorade’s Fierce campaign.
Battery power
With AutoZone Duralast spots ‘Walk the Walk’ and ’Stopping Power’, The Mill was able to deliver a myriad of invisible and fun visual effects shots as UFC champion Chuck Liddell promoted the benefits of the batteries. “It’s a super exaggerated comic spot and Chuck was such a cool dude to shoot with, getting really into all the stunts asked of him,” outlines The Mill’s creative director Robert Sethi. “Whilst we shot live-action explosions, we made them even bigger back at The Mill. It’s a fine balance to strike in something like this – our VFX work had to assist the comedy by creating an exaggerated world for Chuck that’s a little removed from real-life.”
“All the spots were pre-vised by director James Mangold and Third Floor to figure out timings for each spot,” says Sethi. “When we did a tech scout we had figured out from the previs what props we might need for Chuck. The big thing was to make sure Chuck had props to interact with, as the animals are digital and things that don’t actually exist!”
Filming took place at a rock quarry in southern California. At the location, Liddell had the top of a practical rhino head and a rhino horn to hold onto. “The wall he walks through? That was there!,” says Sethi. “We augmented it, added dust, painted and extended it. And for the tank there was a stand-in barrel – for all of these stunts we had the previs as a guide to help figure out the timing of the shots. We also shot practical explosions but replaced them with CG – they acted as a great reference but we wanted to exaggerate them to match the exaggerated style of the spots.”
“We did a laser scan of Chuck, and a Lidar scan of the set,” describes Sethi. “We scanned the props and the car and photographed the car. The bull and the rhino were modeled from scratch, aided by our archive of previous work on animals. The practical rhino head was made to match the proportions of the CG head of the rhino. It was then a matter of animating the rhino running at Chuck, using a muscle system with a skin simulation.”
The wrecking ball was also shot practically. “We put a sandbag in its place so that Chuck could really headbutt something,” notes Sethi. “All of this choreography was crucial and nearly everything in this spot comes from something real, including the car that we really did launch it off a cliff!”
That truck gag made use of three separate trucks, as Sethi explains: “When he drives to the cliff it’s shot on bluescreen and a separate plate. Then we launched a truck off the cliff, which was pretty amazing! We shot Chuck inside the car against a bluescreen again and some of the wheels were replaced by CG. Chuck was then rigged up in real car at right angle for the part when it’s suspended in mid-air, which we replaced fully afterwards in CG, along with the door that Chuck kicks out.”
Liquid players
For recent Gatorade Fierce spots called ‘Slam’ and ‘Face Off’, Mill+ completed several moments of striking fluid simulation and interaction amid sports players. “In each spot we wanted to showcase the hero athlete amidst their sporting performance,” says Mill+ director and creative director Paul Mitchell. “‘Slam’”, starring Paul George, focused on the player performing a classic slam dunk: shot at high speed to capture all of the action and combined with the Gatorade flowing from his body really elevated that moment and set the creative tone for the spot. ‘Face Off’ was slightly different in the sense of storytelling. We built the tension between our hero batter, Bryce Harper, and the pitcher which ultimately ended with Bryce smashing the ball out of orbit.”
TBWA\CHIAT\DAY led the creative that depicted Gatorade flowing from the athlete’s bodies. “We collaborated with them to both define this visual style and figure out how to best compose shots and capture the moments for the Gatorade liquid to flow into on the shoot,” explains Mitchell. “The look was a really interesting development process of figuring out the amount of liquid we should use, how it should flow and where it should flow from.”
Mill+ generated style frames for the key moments and then crafted storyboards to complete the concept. “The liquid was it’s own character,” suggests Josh Hatton, shoot supervisor and 3D lead artist. “It was challenging trying to envision the Gatorade component until we started to render some of the early simulations and place them into shots. Our initial push at that point was to string together several shots with simulations, however crude, and present them to TBWA\Chiat\Day to help them visualize where we wanted to go with the motion and look of the liquid. This was incredibly helpful and allowed us to develop our techniques in order to propagate them across the rest of the shots.”
“The motion of the liquid was scattered across the range of barely moving – the batter waiting for a pitch – to very active – the basketball crossover dribble,” adds Hatton. “There was also the desire to have the liquid flowing off the characters without covering specific parts of them for recognition. And ultimately, after intense development, the behavior of the liquid became more magical in its style. It’s a lighter-weight effect than actual water would be, which gave us more fluid movement and, therefore, more dramatic visuals.”
The team used Houdini for the liquid in terms of effects sims and rendering, with Maya for layout, tracking, matchmoving and animation. The final renders were composited in Nuke, with the initial conform in Smoke. On Houdini, Hatton says “not only is it extremely fast but with parallel processing in batch mode, advanced meshing abilities, powerful geometry controls and flexible architecture, there was simply no question that this was the right tool for the job. Plus, rendering in Mantra not only gave stunning quality, but maximized the usefulness of the many attributes we could generate during simulation, and then pass them along in the meshes to the renderer as extra control passes. Custom shaders were developed easily by wiring or re-wiring an already robust standard shader. This meant we got great results with a very simple lighting setup which we used as a starting point for almost every shot.”