Montreal studio MOTOR Visual Effects recently delivered VFX for three TVCs promoting the Rockland shopping centre in its hometown. The company has produced a microsite to showcase the work and gave fxguide some more info about the effects.
– Above: watch a breakdown of one of the Rockland spots, ‘Rouge’.
MOTOR founder and senior Flame artist Daniel Kelly says the spots were filmed on the RED One camera “as it met the requirements for a limited budget while ensuring absolutely flexibility and control in post. In addition to this we had on-set our portable Flare system which runs on an HP 8470w laptop with an external raid.”
“By creating a pre-vis model of the environments in Softimage XSI,” explains Kelly, “and exporting the scene via FBX into Action on the Flare we could quickly rotate the environment to match the camera angles we were shooting which gave both the director and client a good understanding of the layout of each of the main scenes. We also made good use of SketchBook Pro on iPad to sketch out concepts on-set using stills taken from the on-board cameras monitors.”
Camera tracking was carried out in PFTRack then refined in XSI, with environments built using a combination of XSI, 3ds Max and Flame. “The work involved some heavy lifting for the roto, matte painting was completed in Photoshop and Flame and then camera projected over basic 3D geo and we used a range of technique mixing CGI assets with live-action stock footage to create our fantasy environments,” says Kelly.
MOTOR’s Rockland microsite contains more info and VFX breakdowns. Check it out at http://rockland.motorvfx.com.
