Recent commercial spots range from photorealistic to pure fantasy to something in between. While they all have in common the desire to maximize the creative impact while minimizing the budget, each is unique in terms of goals and technique. Here is a sampling of some innovative work from six vfx houses.

Framestore CFC’s spot, Sea was set at different locations around the world, but filmed mostly in New Zealand. When a statue bursts out of the water, a New Zealand island had to be made to look Greek. © Smirnoff.

Sea
Client: Smirnoff
Agency: J Walter Thompson
VFX House: Framestore CFC

In Smirnoff Sea, which recently earned top commercial kudos at the VES Awards, objects ranging from coins to full-size battleships shoot out of the ocean and land on the shoreline until the sea becomes as crystal clear and pure as Smirnoff. With wall-to-wall effects, the challenge was how to reduce costs in some shots so others could receive the full CG treatment they needed. "In a broad sense, we were trying to get the most for the client's dollar," explains VFX Supervisor William Bartlett. "They had a good budget, but it's never as much as you need."

In one scene featuring an oil rig, the team went through all its options: Shooting a real rig was too expensive and would bring permissions problems. Using stock footage was impractical for a sequence of shots. Building a real model and shooting it was costly, while building a CG model was both costly and time-consuming. Since relatively few camera moves were needed, Framestore opted to shoot stills of "bridges, bits of boats and cranes, metal structures and all kinds of stuff around the [Auckland] docks that looked sort of watery," says Bartlett. The collage created from the images had enough parallax change to allow for the necessary camera moves to make the shot seem like a 3D oil rig.

This technique saved money for some of the other shots that required 3D, such as boats and other objects blasting out of the water. "There's really no way to do that with models," Bartlett continues. Shots featuring interactions with water blended live action and CG. The shot at the end showing a big boat against the Dover cliffs started with a helicopter plate of Dover, which was tracked, and included a 3D sea bottom created from footage of beaches with the tide out and crystal-clear CG water over that. "There was lots of to-ing and fro-ing [between 3D and Flame] in that shot," Bartlett offers.

One challenge came up due to weather conditions. The sea around the oil rig was supposed to look cold and forbidding. When filming from the helicopter in the U.K. and New Zealand, the team took some shots of the sea. "But the weather was really nice,” Bartlett adds. "You want to dive in there." Luckily, Framestore had recently created a gloomy and forbidding CG sea for Superman Returns. "We were 80% there by virtue of the fact that part of the team had solved the same problem earlier in the year."

The spot was set at different locations around the world, but filming occurred mostly in New Zealand. In one sequence featuring a Greek statue bursting out of the water, a New Zealand island in the background didn't look Greek enough. Luckily, Bartlett had been on vacation in Greece a couple of years earlier and brought in some snapshots he had taken on a "rubbish camera." One ended up being used in the out-of-focus background. "I never told the DP that," Bartlett concludes.