The FedEx spot “Carrier Pigeons,” directed by Tom Kuntz of MJZ for ad agency BBDO, presented the challenge of creating enormous CG pigeons. Of course visual effects house Framestore NY has created large feathered creatures before like the Hippogriff creature in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. But on their feature film work the timeline was six to nine months for effects work and for this commercial is was eight weeks. Add to that they had shots where there were a five pigeons as opposed to just one creature in the films. And it still had to be finished at 1920X1080. We spoke to Murray Butler, VFX Supervisor/Head of 2D and Andy Walker, 3D animator, about how they created the effects and slimmed down their film pipeline.

Watch the commercial…

…and then Watch the “Making of”…

Was there ever any thought of doing this any other way than creating the pigeons in CG?
MURRAY BUTLER: When wee saw the boards we quickly decided to go the CGI route. Although it could be done with greenscreen and try to fit that in that where we sped up and slowed down the footage, we wouldn’t have the control over it. Dealing with all the feather dynamics and the hugeness of the pigeons we thought it would be more cinematic in the CG realm and also we could tailor the animation to each scene. You would have had to shoot loads of footage and hope the pigeons did what you wanted them to do. With CG we had ultimate freedom and we had faith in the CG team that they could pull off photorealistic pigeons.

You did have some practical pigeons and did some compositing for the opening scenes , correct?
MB: On set we had about 200 pigeons and as the actors walked down there were handlers sending them across the frame. But we anticipated that we might want to add to those scenes so we did shoot an additional greenscreen session. When it was cut there were some shots that looked a little thin and so we composited in about half the pigeons that are in the final, either from other shots or the green screen just to make it feel consistently busy.

How did you approach the CG in order to create these effects in the allotted production schedule?
ANDY WALKER: As soon as we had the spot awarded they were studying footage of pigeons. From the storyboards we knew what types of actions we were going to see. So we built the main model so the rigging team could rig is for flight and the animators gathered reference footage of pigeons and animated some cycles to get used to animating pigeons.

Meanwhile there was a big R&D push on how to get all the feathers rendered. We had a lot of R&D leftover from film projects like the Hippogriff in Harry Potter and Angel from X-Men 3. So from the film department there was a lot of R&D we could pick up on and use but we used slightly different software from the film department. We had to reengineer that and to make sure it could handle the quicker turnaround needed for commercials. We dumped some of the complexity and added in some of the user-friendly tools so we could get it finished in time. The film tools require a six- to nine-month turnaround for the flying creature and in a commercial we needed it in four weeks.

Technically how was the commercial pipeline different from the film pipeline?
AW: For this commercial we used Maya for modeling, animation, lighting and rendering and Houdini to generate the CG feathers on the bird. For the film work we had an initial feather pipeline with custom plug-ins in Maya. But that was a bit closed and not adaptable enough. So that was ported over to Houdini. We’ve always had a Houdini set up doing exactly the same things as the Maya setup. But lately since we’ve done a few feathery creatures it’s been a lot easier to work in Houdini because you can share new features and you don’t have to have one programmer writing a plug in. With Houdini you don’t have to channel it all through that person, you can write a little chunk and email it to someone and they can adapt it to their own purposes.

Also for the film work they render in RenderMan and we use Mental Ray. There’s a slightly different set of tools for that.

Does creating this for the small screen make the work easier?
MB: Not really. Four years ago you would be working in PAL or NTSC at a smaller resolution. Now everything is HD, which is close to film resolution so you can’t cut too many corners with your rendering.

Was there any difference in approach because a pigeon, even an enormous one, is something people re used to seeing as opposed to a fantastical creature like the Hippogriff in Harry Potter?
MB: The Hippogriff was supposed to look realistic anyways. The main challenge was that we had up to seven or eight pigeons in one shot. So it was just the volume of creatures. In any of the other shows there’s only been one at a time and we’re talking about a much faster turnaround for the commercial.

AW: In terms of pigeons versus fantastical creatures, there was some difficulty. With pigeons, people know the movement of the pigeons so there was a lot of time spent in animation. You are used to the quick, jerky movements of pigeons so emulating that and then getting that to read on a large scale was a bit tricky. If the animation looked natural we thought making the pigeons look good would be possible. But if the animation was off at all it wouldn’t sell. So it really came down to spot on animation.