Vfx artist Joe Laffey and director Paul Santana created X-Games Skateboard as a labor of love. Laffey’s goal was to get on the map for vfx work. All images © Santana and Laffey.

Laffey took a month to create a detailed 3D animatic, which was then used as a reference point during production.

What do you do when you feel the need to branch out and experiment with new visual effects techniques and ideas and there’s no client to fund it? In the case of vfx artist Joe Laffey and his directorial collaborator, Paul Santana, you do it anyway and then proceed to wow the industry with a spec spot called X-Games Skateboard. The clever, fast-paced, MTV-style :30 spot features the tardy professional skateboarder, Caine Gayle, defying gravity, narrow alleys and city congestion to catch up to his fellow boarders on their X-Games-bound bus in Los Angeles. Funny thing is, Gayle never skated an inch in any urban metropolis to get the thrilling shots highlighted in the piece. LAFFEY.tv, the animation and vfx arm of Laffey Computer Imaging, created the entire spot by merging greenscreen technology, proprietary free-moving camera techniques and good old-fashioned 2D and 3D animation — all for under $10,000. “It was a labor of love.” Laffey beams about the project that’s putting his company on the vfx map.

Laffey’s St. Louis, Missouri-based company was formed in the early `90s. “We started out with still imaging for advertising and print work primarily,” he explains. “All along we were doing some motion graphics effects and 3D work, but I started in 1991, and 3D software and hardware that was even mildly affordable was so slow. I love fooling people with things that look real. I’d much rather do things that are unambiguously real, along the lines of The Lord of the Rings. All that stuff is supposed to look real, and for the most part, it does. Finally, when Electric Image and the PowerMac came along, I actually had the ability to get an affordable system and I moved more into visual effects.” Over the last decade, the company has been able to shift with the advances in technology, building their client list on their ability to create high-end, attention-grabbing visual products. “The visual effects work is about 60-70% of our income, but about 50% of our work now. On staff, it’s one modeler, Mike Myers, and myself. We work on Macs and PCs. I mainly used Windows, nowadays. I use LightWave 3D, Digital Fusion, a little After Effects and Commotion. I did write some custom software that I’ve written for Digital Fusion, some plug-ins, that I actually will be selling if I ever have the time to put that together. I’ll probably tap into XSI or Maya, at some point, but since I’m not doing character work, I’m more concerned about the renderer.”

Seeking to push the company profile, Laffey embarked on developing the X-Games Skateboard project as an attention-getting spec project. “It was put together by the director, Paul Santana, and me to sell us. Paul was trying to get signed with a company and I was trying to get more visual effects work. We did an extensive test for the free-moving camera tricks that we used in the [spot.] We spent six to nine months working on this 20-second test. It was almost a spot, but it didn’t have a plot. By the time we were done with it, we felt like complete idiots for spending so much time on something that wasn’t sellable. We took all that R&D and thought of something we could do that would allow us to have this free-moving camera with live actors. The key thing for us was that people needed to know that the shots were impossible. They needed to see a shot, like the alley sequence, and viewers would know something was different.”