The Mill NY Post New Chevron Campaign

21st September 2005 - The Mill NY have just completed the post on the new campaign for Chevron. In ‘Strollers’ we see thousands of baby buggies taking a ‘stroll’ around the world: zooming down the freeway, around the Colosseum in Rome, meeting some elephants on the savannah and whizzing around the streets of Paris.

Flame Artist, Westley Sarokin and his team initially had to create clean plates for all the shots, removing any cars or people that were visible. These plates were then passed through to the 3D team where lead 3D Dadi Einarsson and the 3D team in NY worked on every shot - 33 in total - turning baby strollers into busy highway traffic.

Low resolution ‘stroller’ models were animated into every scene and then loaded onto an avid to develop the pace and feel of the spot. Once the clients were happy with the basic animation higher resolution models were added in and the team slowly built up realistic animation frame by frame while lighting TDs lit and prepared the scenes for final render. A large number of different CG strollers were created and tweaked on a scene by scene basis based on different styles from around the world. Shots varied from close ups of strollers going through a car wash to very wide shots of freeways with thousands of strollers in traffic. The animation was developed to reflect how a stroller would behave if it was a car, ie adding jiggle on cobbled streets, slight tipping over during cornering and braking, and character traits such as cutting into traffic or zipping in to steal a parking spot. Custom scripting was developed in house to facilitate the wider shots where large amounts of traffic were generated procedurally. The preliminary compositing of the shots was completed in Shake by the CG team.

For next spot ‘Wind’ the location is Paris and a strong wind is blowing newspapers, waiter’s tips off café tables, a man’s bowler hat is blown off his head and its buffeted through the streets of Paris. In the end scene we see the reason for the wind – the Eiffel Tower has a massive propeller at the top making it look like a huge wind turbine.

To create a realistic bowler hat, it was shot on green screen and on a rotating axis. Westley gave the animated hat realistic movements using expressions in flame. This is by which sculpted mathematical noise functions create motions in a structured and procedural way. The blades of the propeller and all the fractured lighting through the blades were also built in 3D.

In 'Carriages' the production company Pytka stated it would not have looked as impressive as it does without the Mill's help, '“The Mill deserves the credit for that spot. It takes more than just adjusting for light and shadows with technology to pull it off, you need an artists eye”

Due to the nature of this project, it was imperative that 3D and 2D worked very closely together. Excellent collaboration between the teams to ensured maximum shot quality and the end result was believable, photo realistic final images.

The campaign breaks this Sunday 18th September.

Product - Chevron / Agency - Y&R / Creatives - Gabe Hoskins & Darren Moran / Executive Producer - Rich Rosenthal / Production Company - Pytka / Director - Joe Pytka / Producer - Linda Masse / Executive Producer - Tara Fitzpatrick / Editing Company - The Whitehouse / Editor - Marc Langely / Assistant Editor - Jeff Jay / Editorial Producer - Corina Dennison / NY Creative Director - Angus Kneale / Telecine - Fergus McCall / Lead Flame - Westley Sarokin / Support - Jeanette Williford and Tara DeMarco / Wind/Baby Carriages Producers - Verity Grantham and Melanie Wickham / CG/Animation Supervisor - Dadi Einarsson / Animation - Joshua Merck, Dadi Einarsson, Aron Hjartarson / Technical Direction - Arlene Persaud, Douglas Luka, Sam Kim, Yann Mabille / Modelling - Wyatt Savarese / Programming - Rick Walia / Shake Compositing - Arlene Persaud, Dadi Einarsson, Douglas Luka, Sam Kim - Yann Mabille / Software - Softimage XSI, Shake, Adobe After Effects, Adobe Photoshop, Avid Xpress Pro,Flame / Telecine - Fergus McCall / Lead Flame - Westley Sarokin / CGI Supervisor - Alex Arce / Modeling & Texturing - Wyatt Savarese / CGI Producer - Asher Edwards

Site by Engage.