Lux (Shine) Neon Girl

Framestore
Overall, production designer Dale Newton spent some six months on "Neon Girl," which includes a couple of months on inspirational design, through the early animatic work, to full production and delivery. "It didn't feel like an animation project, more like a film making project. It was more of a creative challenge than a technical one, from my point of view," he says, adding with a smile, "Though [senior technical director] Diarmid Harrison-Murray -- who handled the lighting -- might have a different take on it."

Diarmid Harrison-Murray, senior td, concurs. "The process we developed was interesting, actually," he says, "Dale started off by sketching everything on paper, and this was converted into vector art using Toon Boom, a vector animation package. From Toon Boom the work went through Flash, which gave us a file format that enables getting this 2D curve animation into Houdini.

In Houdini we'd put the animated curves through a feedback loop to generate all of the neons, whether they were on or off, and then we'd reapply their animation back on top of that to tell us which tubes should switch on at which point. So as well as the lighting and rendering, we were building all of the geometry of the neon tubes."

Because of the evolving nature of the project, a fairly automatic, procedural process was desirable. The elements couldn't be hand-modeled, because one change to the animation or design would mean everything would have to be done again. Explains Harrison-Murray, "The system we developed allowed us to plug the 2D animated curves at one end and get out neon tubes at the other end complete with all their bolts and trimming and a suitable amount of natural variation in appearance and behavior: a controllable but automatic process. We had to monitor this and keep an eye out for bugs - but we got a smooth pipeline going eventually."

One of the big challenges in lighting this spot was the question of 'indirect illumination.' In this case all the light cast by the neon lights and bounced around by their surroundings. With a lighting set-up this huge, quite a bit of time had to be spent optimizing a system that would give the indirect illumination and reflections needed, without bringing the render farm to its knees. Says Harrison-Murray, "We were rendering with Renderman, which has various systems in place to help you deal with a ton of geometry without running out of memory. In addition, the reality of production demands means that providing the result looks great, elegant fakery is quite acceptable..."

The architecture behind the look, the series of rendered passes, which create every facet and nuance of light behavior, was devised by Harrison-Murray. Once prepared, these passes were handed to Inferno artist Tim Osborne who prepared the final image, adjusting color values, brightness and contrast to ensure that the neons read correctly against the evening sky.

Credits for Lux (Shine) Neon Girl
Framestore CFC
Production design: Dale Newton
Design: Sylvain Marc
Animators: Dale Newton, Sylvain Marc
Additional animation: Florent de La Taille
Senior technical director: Diarmid Harrison-Murray
Technical directors: Guillame Fradin, David Mellor
Junior technical director: Paul Jones
Modeling: Mary Swinnerton
Senior compositing artist: Tim Osborne
Producer: Scott Griffin
Santo
General cd/art director: Maximiliano Anselmo
General cd: Sebastian Wilhelm
Copywriters: Matias Ballada / Sebastian Wilhelm
Head of production: Facundo Perez
Agency producer: Andres Salmoyraghi
Rattling Stick
Director: Daniel Kleinman
Exec production: Johnnie Frankel

Nissan Dualis Pass

FuelVFX
Shoji Kawamori, cult Japanese designer and creator of Manga classics like Macross/Robotech and Patlabor, was asked by Nissan to design a robot to represent their new model Nissan Dualis. Given the stature of Kawamori in the Japanese design community, Fuel felt honored to be able to team up again with director, Josh Baker, in the challenge to bring the design to life. In the three spots, Jump, Rise and Pass the driver and the Dualis are transformed into a hybrid robot or "powered suit" representing the vehicle's blend of expert handling and advanced technology. And in the great Manga tradition, when faced with urban gridlock, the Dualis makes his escape in typical anime style.

The Nissan campaign pays tribute to Japan's tradition of manga, an artform that Hollywood has appropriated in blockbusters like The Matrix and, more recently, Transformers. Fuel wanted to pay respect to that tradition and at the same time contribute to the genre by developing something a little different -- a more "organic" animated transition, that blends man and machine into a suit of 21st century armor.

Simon Maddison, Fuel's VFX supervisor on the three spots, explains that, "The organic feel was not altogether straightforward to achieve. Three distinct models needed to be created: the robot, the car, and a 'car/robot hybrid,' which would help blend the shapes and geometry in the transition. The commercials were lensed in and around Sydney, and Maddison was on hand to supervise the visual effects shots, many of which involved either moving cameras or car rigs. "We were mindful of recording HDRI (high dynamic range image) lighting references on location, to apply later in post to the robot animation. In this way we are able to match the live-action lighting conditions and to reflect the city environments in the robot's polished metallic surface, all techniques that help with integrating the CG into the live-action."

Credits Nissan Dualis Pass
Fuel
VFX supervisor: Simon Maddison
VFX producer: Dave Kelly
3D lead: Mike Bain
Lead Flame artist: Karen Fabling
Sydney Film Co.
Director: Josh Baker
Producer: Nicole Crozier