When NetZero decided to create a campaign to push its next-generation
connectivity, its in-house creative team came up with a concept: A man
in a futuristic white room sits at a desk with a computer, out of which
pours fantastical 3D Web pages. How they brought it to life was as
direct an experience as possible in the commercial production realm. No
agency or production company was involved. They approached Santa
Monica-based Riot — a facility they had used before — to do the visual
effects and met Tim Conway, an experienced visual effects supervisor
and motion control cameraman who had recently joined Riot from visual
effects boutique Creo Collective (along with 12 other artists).
Within days, Riot not only got the VFX job, but Conway had also become
the spot’s director, a first-time gig. He went about creating the
NetZero spot with meticulous planning and pre-vis. Scanning approved
storyboards, he did a 2D animation to figure out timing. "Once we got
it there, I brought it into Combustion and animated it with the audio
to figure out how many frames per shot until I built out the 900 frames
of the commercial," he says. With the animatic in hand, 3D pre-vis
artists Matthew Lamb and Marcus Levere used Alias Maya to build rough
models of the character and the environment and started to animate
camera moves. Conway obtained a model of the motion-control crane
they’d be using and put the hand-animated moves into the 3D model of
the camera crane to make sure all the moves were "legal" and didn’t
poke through the floor or ceiling. "This way you know you’ll get
exactly what you saw in your pre-vis," Conways says.
Once Conway shot the man sitting at the desk, the Riot team jumped
feet-first into an entirely 3D CGI universe. Unlike many VFX houses,
which rely on a single 3D animation package, Riot created the spot with
three packages: NewTek LightWave 3D, Alias Maya and Autodesk 3ds Max.
To some degree, the different packages were used for different tasks:
LightWave artists modeled the CG room and created a practical and
futuristic-looking home environment, and Maya was used to create
futuristic tunnels and a city that represents the future Internet. But
Conway points out that the impetus for picking a particular tool had
very little to do with its features. "It wasn’t so much the tools but
the artist’s proficiency in those tools that guided us to that
package," he explains. "We know what everyone is capable of and what
their package is."
What makes it possible to accommodate so many packages is proprietary
code written by Riot programmers that makes the pipeline between them
effortless. "Somebody may set up a scene in LightWave, move into Maya
to add animation and then move it to 3ds Max for lighting," says Conway.
Using Photoshop files of invented Web pages supplied by NetZero, Riot
3D artists turned the images into 3D images that were procedurally
animated to float through tunnels created in Maya. The spot had a 3D
end in the Inferno, where the Maya scenes had been turned into action
files for 3D compositing. The experience, says Conway, was almost like
living in the commercial’s fantastical environment. "Everyone at Riot
got to play in 3D," he says.
The meticulously planned shoot used pre-vis data for motion-control moves.
