Mill London and NY Team Together for Arca Ex

20th September 2004 - With a new campaign of two spots demonstrating the power of big numbers, Arca Ex neatly illustrates how they trade $14 billion in US shares a day. In “Chess”, two homely pensioners play an unassuming game of chess in a New York-looking park. Gradually a crowd of spectators is drawn to their game and then suddenly it seems like the entire city is scrambling to get a view while shouting advice. The spot ends with the title: ‘Numbers this big are hard to ignore’. Similarly, “Birds” shows an unsuspecting couple sitting on a park bench, throwing some popcorn out to a few hungry pigeons. Their contended looks soon become quizzical as they realise they have slowly become inundated by an enormous sea of birds.

Both ads required a significant amount of 2D and 3D work from both The Mill’s London and New York offices, with the two locations working symbiotically to fulfil the brief. This project was the first to truly exploit The Mill’s full connectivity via its recently installed dedicated 45Mb pipeline which links flame suites and CG workstations across the Atlantic. This new pipeline allows broadcast quality material to be sent in half realtime, giving both locations the ability to run in tandem.

“Chess” was shot in Buenos Aires, but had to look like the heart of NYC. So Angus Kneale and his team took photos of architecture local to The Mill NY, like classic NYC fire escape stairways, and used them as digital mattes to give the location a more New York feel. This was further pushed by adding English banners and signs. Angus also had overcome issues of health and safety that affected the shoot: people could not be shot hanging out windows in anything above first floors. So extras were shot against greenscreen and composited into high-up windows, which were sometimes purpose-built in Flame. Only 40 - 50 extras were used on location; so, in order to create the necessary claustrophobic, crowded feel much crowd replication was done using multiple plates and 3D. The end scene was realised by shooting a near-perfect city park, stripping away unwanted objects and expanding the borders in 2D with matte paintings. The Mill’s 3D artist, Jordi Bares, then completed approximately 15 ‘Massive’ tests before successfully striking the right balance between the density of people and the clarity of their actions. Eventually, Jordi decided to hand animate some 3D people so as to ensure their actions were realistic.

“Birds” saw even more input from The Mill’s 3D team, as led by Ben Smith. The 3D team became more than familiar with all-things-birds by spending a day with a pigeon fancier in London’s East End to study wing structure etc. In order to create a convincing and varied mass of birds, Ben created 3D pigeons, black birds, starlings and cow birds. These were developed in a variety of resolutions: the hi-res versions could fly, land and walk but the low-res birds could only perform one of those actions. Each type of birds was rendered in varying combinations of textures: from patterns to wing features to colours. Meanwhile, in Mill NY, Dadi was busy creating a bank of animation cycles - flying, flapping, pecking, walking, perching, landing and so on. Between all these different variables, the team created tens of thousands of unique birds. They used a bespoke particle goal simulation system so that the 3D birds all looked as though they were heading for the same area whilst maintaining realistic distribution both in the air and on the ground. This entailed Jordi writing a special script to make sure landings were randomly off-set.

Product - Arca Ex / Title - “Chess” / “Birds” / Agency - Fallon Minneapolis / Creatives - Bobby Appleby - Mike Ward / Producer - Brigette Whisnant / Prod Co - MJZ / Director - Matthijs Van Heijningen / Producer - Lisa Ruffler / Film Editors - Johnny Bongo / Editor - Jonno Griffith / Facility House - The Mill New York / Producer - Verity Grantham - Melanie Wickham / Telecine Artist - Fergus McCall / VFX Supervisor - Aron Hjartarson - Lorraine McLaughlin / Lead Flame - Angus Kneale - Stefan Coory / Flame Assist - Jamie Scott - Jeanette Williford - Adam Grint - Billy Vine - James Corden / 3D - Jordi Bares - Aron Hjartarson - Dadi Einarsson - Arlene Persaud - Ben Smith - Laurent Makowski - James Stuart / Title Animation/ - Mastering - Jeanette Williford - Richard DeCarteret / - Airdate - 17th September 2004 - (“Birds” only)

Site by Engage.