The Spot that Took Years to Make

" Sticks and Stones " is a 40-second spot showing objects falling from the sky to the music and lyrics of Nat King Cole’s " L-O-V-E." Actions on-screen reflect what viewers hear in the song. For instance, the lyric, "’V’ is very Extra-ordinary," is represented by a UFO hovering through the air, quickly followed by a newspaper with the words, " Extra."

"I think with a pencil in my hand," says director Randy Roberts, Rhythm & Hues ( Los Angeles, CA), who got his start as a painter and illustrator. "I’ve got a library of notebooks that go back years and years. During down periods, I’ve taken some of my old ideas, gone through them and made full storyboards." For " Sticks and Stones," Roberts went back to early sketches of a beat of music represented by objects falling and hitting the earth. "I had just done the first KCRW spot,‘Balance,’ and I realized that this idea would also fit with their image campaign." The concept evolved into flipping cards, and the Cole song eventually followed.

"The song dictated everything," says Roberts, who was a musician at an early age. "When I worked as an animator, I always tried to work to a track, rather than do the animation and then have the track fit in. Music can be much more complex than the visuals."

Because KCRW campaigns are basically glorified public-service announcements, talented creatives choose to do high-caliber work for free. Roberts sketched the concept for " Sticks and Stones " around five years ago, and shot the material "when opportunities came up," he says.

"If I have a couple of extra hours or some downtime on a shoot, I’ll try to pick off a little piece of the ideas in the notebook," he explains. "I already had some of the background elements shot." For instance, Roberts captured the monkey and baboon on a shoot in Africa, knowing he’d use them later. Another time, after a shoot in the California desert, Roberts rallied the crew to stay late and shoot the background element. "It’s one of those things where everybody out here listens to KCRW. We took a motor home and a scissor lift and a whole truck full of junk, and just started dropping it and doing a still shoot."

Once "L-O-V-E" was chosen, the challenge was timing the falling objects to the beat and lyrics of the song. Because the shots were picked up over the course of years, it was impossible to have a visual effects supervisor on set, although Roberts rarely uses one. "My first 10 years in the business were as a computer graphics animator, and I did a lot of effects work as an art director. It’s so second-nature to me," says Roberts. "I tend to work very well with motion-control operators and Flame artists because that’s the area that I’m extremely comfortable with. I do like having a Flame artist on set, but a lot of times I’ll just say,‘Save the money.’"

The 35mm film was timed by Company 3′s Stefan Sonnenfeld and transferred to DigiBeta before turning things over to SolDesignfx’s Heusser.

Roberts and Rhythm & Hues editor Michael D’ambrosio edited the footage, and when an object didn’t fall on every beat, it was up to Heusser to supplement the items that fell with CG objects (the dumpster, the spaceship) while spacing everything evenly on screen.

"There was a lot of roto work in there," says Heusser, who worked in Discreet’s Inferno. "Lots of frame-by-frame in Flame, cutting people and objects out, difference matting, and moving stuff around. We did some roto in Combustion as well.

"I pretty much had to start with a blank shot of the desert and individually place every object that fell," Heusser continues. "It was a little more complicated than just cutting objects out, because once something came to rest, I had to create a film loop of it so that it maintained its grain structure and stayed alive in the scene. That way, it would stay there even if something fell in front of it. I’d then cut that out separately and move it somewhere else."

Heusser was able to finish the mattes of the falling objects by using difference matting (a technique involving the subtraction of one plate from another to be left with a new element) as opposed to hand-rotoing. "Difference matting in most scenarios doesn’t work well, because film has grain and movement, there’s movement in the camera gate, there’s movement in the telecine," says Heusser, "but on this job, it worked well. Possibly because the desert is such a wide expanse, the objects were generally far away, and grain was pretty good."

Heusser’s biggest challenge was getting the pacing and timings to the music to feel right. Once those decisions were made, the rest became fairly mechanical. "It took a little bit of playing with things to get the right feel for it. You couldn’t just take an object and plop it anywhere. You wanted to feel a progression around the screen and make it flow. But that was also the fun part."

Both Heusser and Roberts share a preference for spot-work over feature-film projects. "[Commercials] are like personal films," says Roberts. "That’s my passion right now. You get on a bad feature and you’re on it for over a year. In commercials, if it’s the worst experience in your life, it’ll be over within a couple of weeks to a month.

Charlex went high-def recently, when the Manhattan company upgraded its Smoke and Flame seats to the new SGI Tezro platform. The step-up means that artists will be able to work faster and spend less time archiving. Chris Byrnes, Charlex’s president, jokes, "They’re going to have come up with new reasons to take a smoking break, because they’re not going to be waiting around for their jobs to archive." Running on Tezro will also speed up SD work exponentially he notes. "As a business, we’re concerned with HD’s cost of entry. This a very elegant HD solution. At the same time, it’s resolution-independent, so you can work with film plates, high-def elements, or NTSC elements all in one project"…. Visual effects artist and editor Jay Tilin has joined R!OT Manhattan. Tilin, employing both Quantel’s Henry and Discreet Logic’s Fire, is known both for his award-winning spot work and for longform and music-video finishing. Tilin’s recent spots include Ralph Lauren, The Olive Garden and Victoria’s Secret. Jump-starting his R!OT gig, Tilin has already completed projects for Nexium, New Balance and Value City Department Stores. Tilin recently left The Anx and Tapehouse, NY, where he was an editor for over 12 years…. Brooklyn, NY -based Dancing Diablo recently designed and animated promo spots for Paramount/MTV Films’ The Perfect Score. The spot combines stop-motion and live-action footage where a cupcake comes to life and explains why a young student needs to do well on his SAT. Creative partner and director of animation Peter Sluszka explains the animation process: "We created a flexible, animatable cupcake that looks like the real thing. We shot green-screen, which was later keyed out. Our model had to match up perfectly. Using the live-action footage as a reference, we calculated camera angles and lighting to make the composite as seamless as possible."