Drop Pillows Not Bombs

22nd May 2007 - Imagine a world in which conflicts are not fought with guns, bombs or missiles, but instead with the best weaponry from our youth—a pillow. "Protest", a spot directed by Fredrik Bond and shot by Academy Award winning Pan’s Labyrinth DP, Guillermo Navarro, reveals a fun substitute to our current method of conflict resolution. In this Absolut World, protestors and riot guards stand off for a full scale, colossal pillow fight.

The Mill’s 3D team, led by CG Artist Ben Smith, had three challenges posed to them—to make the shoot of 500 extras feel like 17,000 protestors and police, to provide clouds of ambient feathers to the pillow explosions and to build CG ultralight aircrafts to drops pillow bombs.

Ben arranged a motion capture session, which recorded the movements of actors performing variations of the pillow fight. These movements were then mapped out in Massive, where Ben had built a “brain” that closely simulated the actions of the live actors into the movements of digital protestors and police. By blending together the gestures and activities to create a fluid feel, it becomes virtually impossible to tell the difference between CG and live extras.

The Mill used Maya's new nCloth system to accurately simulate the pillows and nets for the ultralight bombing sequences. By replacing all the live pillow elements with CG doubles, the sequences could be finely choreographed to fit the requirements of the shots. To design the vast array of feathers swarming the crowd, the team created various layers of particle and volumetric effects that were then composited together in Flame. Finally, the team rebuilt a squadron of CG ultralight aircrafts from photos taken of one ultralight plane on the shoot. The 3D team rebuilt every detail of the planes including the flight surfaces and controls, which gave their motion a very realistic feel.

The spots are part of a global campaign entitled “In an Absolut World”. The Mill New York also finished “Swimming” and “Taxi”, two other amusing spots for the Absolut brand.

Product - Absolut / Title - Protest - Swimming - Taxi / Agency - TBWAChiatDay / Executive Creative Director - Gerry Graf / Creative Director - Rob Smiley / ACD Art Director - Pam Fujimoto / ACD Copywriter - Pierre Lipton / Copywriter - Paul Bartow / Senior Producer - Nathy Aviram / Production Company - MJZ / Director - Fredrik Bond / Producer - Line Postmyr / Executive Producers - David Zander - Lisa Rich / DP - Guillermo Navarro / Editing Company - Final Cut NY / Editor - Rick Russell / Assistant Editor - Patrick Colman / VFX Producer - Jo Arghiris / VFX Supervisors - Angus Kneale - Michael Gibson - - Creative Director/ - Lead Flame Artist - Angus Kneale / Flame Artists - Cole Schreiber - Tony Robbins / Combustion - Greg Kilpatrick - Winston Lee / Support - Mary Casey / CG Producer - Camila De Biaggi / CG Supervisor/ - Lead Animator - Ben Smith / CG Artists - Wyatt Savarese - Emily Meger - Kevin Ives - Sarah Edwards - Andres Eguiguren

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