‘MINI vs Monster’, a stereoscopic spot directed by Robert Jitzmark, features digital crowds and other VFX by Glassworks. Lead 2D and 3D artists Morten Vinther and Markus Lauterbach from the studio’s Amsterdam office break down the work. Included is a making of VFX clip.
fxg: What was Glassworks’ brief for the commercial?
Morten Vinther (lead 2D artist): We talked to the production company, Camp David, and agency BSUR Amesterdam in summer last year about creating this spot for MINI and doing it all stereoscopically. One of the first considerations we had to address was that we needed to create CG crowds for our stadium. They wanted a massive sort of crowd of 40,000 to 50,000 people. Another thing we needed to think about was how were we going to get this Monster Truck to jump over the MINIs. Was it able to jump over the MINIs? Did we have to create CG MINIs? Did we have to do lots of passes and takes?
Following off from that, there were all sorts of things the director was keen to get in there, like dust coming off the wheels and smoke in the stadium, which we weren’t sure we were going to be able to do while we were shooting it, so we had to work out ways for potentially doing it afterwards. With the spot being stereo, there was a concern things were going to look flat, because obviously we couldn’t use texture takes and monoscopically shot elements.
Watch a breakdown of Glassworks’ VFX for the spotfxg: What kind of previs or storyboards did you create?
Vinther: We got on board very early on when they had initial storyboards. We did a bit of a previs of the jump, just to try and work out hero angles and camera angles. There were also initial talks about using rigs suspended by wires that could move quickly across the stadium, so we wanted to see what that might look like in the computer, and we did a previs of that. We also did some early testing on the interocular distance, just to try and get a feel for the stadium. We had some early measurements of the monster truck and the stadium and we put it together to get an idea of what sort of scale we wanted from the shots.
fxg: How was the spot shot in terms of the location and the stereo camera rig?
Vinther: We shot in Las Vegas at night at the Sam Boyd Stadium. The camera rig was a BX3 beamsplitter rig from 21st Century 3D. You’ve basically got one camera mounted shooting down at the mirror and another one going through the glass.
We were shooting with Phantom cameras, which were great but they can be a bit tricky sometimes. Some of the cameras weren’t rated the same and weren’t performing quite the same. It was obviously important for us shooting with left and right cameras that they were rated the same way. In the end, we had four or five Phantom cameras out there we were pairing up.
We also had an auxiliary rig, which was a couple of RED ONEs. There was just a huge amount of lights and Technocranes in the stadium. I think everything else from this point on in my career is really going to be a downer, because shooting in Las Vegas for a few nights and shooting monster trucks in a stadium – it was pretty awesome!
fxg: What kinds of things were you doing on-set in terms of capturing camera and survey data?
Vinther: We were very careful in collecting as much camera data as we could. All the usual things – focal length, distance between the two lenses, the distance to the point of interest. We did an entire survey of the stadium and photographed everything. We also measured everything with great care, so that we were able to re-build the stadium to scale again. We also brought our Spheron camera out to do some HDR scans, which proved to be handy later on for lighting references and some texturing.
fxg: Was there also an elements shoot for things like smoke and dust?
Vinther: We did some stereo textures of smoke drifting through the stadium. Actually, a weird thing happens in the desert at night – the winds really kick up. The smoke that you send up at 8 o’clock at night would gently drift through, but as the night progressed, at about 3am you’d have these hurricane winds going through the stadium, which made it a little bit tricky.
fxg: Let’s talk about the stadium extensions and crowd work you had to do. How did you approach that, initially?
Markus Lauterbach (lead 3D artist): Well, the stadium wasn’t in the first brief, but we ended up building a second tier of the stadium.
Vinther: Yeah, I think Sam Boyd is rated at 30,000 people, and there was a feeling between the director and the creative that the stadium didn’t feel big enough. Everything in the ad is totally larger than life. Even the flames we put in behind the car. So basically we doubled the size of this stadium.
fxg: What was the CG crowd system you relied upon?
Lauterbach: We’ve used had a crowd system here for a number of years at Glassworks. Basically it uses lots of image strips of people that are mapped onto planes and distributed. We did some testing, and when I heard the spot was going to be at nighttime and the lighting would be created by explosions and things like that, I thought that it might actually be better to create the whole crowd with real geometry and real 3D people, because we needed more control of the lighting. From that day on, I focussed on using Softimage ICE and together with my colleague, Tim Bolland, we tried to get the crowds going that would use ICE as the distribution level.
fxg: What reference did you use for the people in the crowd?
Lauterbach: We started modeling the whole Glassworks crew here. Everybody had to come into our room and we photographed them from all angles and then started modeling those guys as the generic crowd.
Vinther: On set, as well, we shot as many of the extras as we could and photographed them for this particular crowd system.
Lauterbach: It was really simple geometry, but we used these guys to do generic cheering or watching or standing up – all these animation examples would then be blended into our ICE crowd.
fxg: What did you see as the advantage in using ICE over your existing system?
Lauterbach: The huge advantage with ICE was that it was fully implemented into the software we use anyway, which was XSI, so it would seamlessly blend into our pipeline. And then if we needed a little bit more on top of what we already had, we could just create an algorithm and blend it into our ICE tree and get a new effect. It was really controllable and fast.
fxg: Can you talk about your rendering pipeline for the crowds?
Lauterbach: We used mental ray, but we really just created lots and lots of passes and lots of lighting passes for the explosions and rim lights. We used a colour coded lighting technique where we just created three different lights in our scene, which would be red, green and blue and Morten’s team could use these lighting passes to create the effect of the explosions.
fxg: What were some of the other CG elements you had to create for the spot?
Lauterbach: Apart from the crowd, we had to create the reflections on the cars when the truck is jumping over the MINIs. We had to create fire fountains coming out of the MINI and create dust layers. For the MINIs, the client gave us CAD data for each of the cars, which was amazing but it was such a dense mesh. You get every little button.
fxg: How did working in stereo impact on your visual effects work?
Lauterbach: I’ve worked on one stereo commercial before and in terms of the 3D work, it’s really just the double amount of work really. Everything you do you have to do twice.
Vinther: From a compositing point of view, there are some chores that can become really painful. Things like roto’ing – there’s a lot more time and effort for stereo images. Because of the rigs we were using, there were some colour discrepancies and disparity issues between the two cameras. Pulling a luma key say of the left eye gives you different results to pulling the same luma key on the right eye, for obvious reasons. But in the end it was a great result.
fxg: Were they any particular considerations you had to take into account with your crowds, given it was a stereo spot?
Lauterbach: What we figured out with our crowd was the whole 3D effect that we had to create with the crowd. The crowd would never be something that would jump out of the frame, or be in the front of the commercial, so we tried to use the whole 3D effect on the crowd carefully so it would still have the sensation on the truck and MINIs, but give you this subtle sensation that these guys are in the background somewhere moving about.
fxg: What tools were you using for tracking, and then for doing all the compositing?
Lauterbach: We used PFTrack which worked a treat. Since we shot parallel, we could have used just the left eye and tracked it, but I think sometimes we preferred using PFTrack.
Vinther: We used Flame 2011 to do all the comping, and used all the new stereo tools in Flame for setting the convergence and fixing the colours and flicker and keystoning artefacts. On some of the images the right camera for instance needed to be warped to line up properly with the left. It was pretty handy having those new tools in Flame for dealing with the stereo images and that whole batch stereo pipeline worked really well for us.
fxg: What kind of secondary effects, like reflections and atmosphere, were involved in the spot?
Lauterbach: In just about every shot we had to put something on top. The more we progressed with this commercial, the more we wanted to create depth with particulates in the air and reflections onto the MINIs. There were other effects like fire and passes for fog as well.
Vinther: For some of the stuff that’s further in the background where there isn’t a whole lot of parallax shift, we were able to use some 2D textures and shift convergence. For some of the foreground stuff we had to create some 3D particles in Flame. That was good fun. It was a mix of a whole bunch of things from 3D and 2D.
fxg: Can you talk about the grade for the commercial?
Vinther: The grade of the commercial was a little bit tricky because there were a gazillion layers of these MINI cars. The client wanted to have a particular look for particular bits of the MINI, so everything was graded in layers. One of the things we found when we started working on the grading was that – say when you’re looking at stereo your eye tends to wander and look at many different things in the image that you wouldn’t look at necessarily in a monoscopic image.
So early on we were thinking of grading in just left eye and basically almost copy pasting to the right eye. But we found that there were a lot of secondary things that we needed to do to tweak the grade in Flame afterwards. There might be a guy in the foreground that we wanted to look at, but in stereo your eye just wanders and you want to look at, say, the girls in the background.
fxg: What was the production time and crew size for Glassworks?
Vinther: Initially, we had about three or four weeks to sort out the ICE crowds. After we came back from the shoot it went into offline for a couple of weeks and then we had about a month to complete the spot. We actually started with a monoscopic version for delivery first, and then worked on the stereo. There were three people working in 3D and two to three Flame ops.
Credit List
Director: Robert Jitzmark
Production Co: Camp David (Sweeden)
Producer: Anna Adamson
Agency: BSUR Amsterdam
Producer: Niko Koot
Creative Director: Jason Scragger
Copywriter: Gian Carlo Lanfranco
Art Director: Rolando Cordova
Glassworks Team:
Producer: Hannah McDonald
2D Head: Morten Vinther
2D Artist: Caio Sorrentino
3D Head: Markus Lauterbach
3D Artist: Tim Bolland
Grading: Ben Rogers