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This year, CareerBuilder.com tried a new approach in its Super Bowl ads and called on Radium to create the vfx in a series of five spots, including Darts (above). All Darts images courtesy of Radium.

What's the Super Bowl anymore without the commercials? Ask any game watcher or party attendee and they'll confess the annual cavalcade of ingenious advertising featured in every game break for station identification is now half the fun of the viewing experience. Super Bowl 2007 offered a lot of new trends, especially with the addition of consumer-generated spots created by fans for products like Doritos and the NFL. But the big day also found a lot of what's become the staple of the show: high-end, high concept ads vying for attention spans with eye-popping visual effects. The game is an increasingly competitive market for vfx houses, both large and small, to land the accounts that will allow them to show off their skills to a global audience. Creating a buzz worthy spot not only translates to potential new clients and revenue streams, but it's also become a sought after feather in the cap of companies to achieve Super Bowl greatness with their contributions to a winning commercial launch. VFXWorld talks to three very different companies, Radium, Brickyard VFX and Sway Studios, about their 2007 Super Bowl spots:

Radium, Career Builder Darts
The office is a jungle -- literally for CareerBuilder.com. The career search website used monkeys in their past Super Bowl campaigns to illustrate the frustrations of the corporate world and the need to use their site to look for new, more satisfying employment. But this year, they tried a new approach by literally comparing the office rat race with the wilds of the jungle in a series of five spots called Darts, Promotion Pit, The New Guy, Performance Evaluation and Doughnuts.

Simon Mowbray, Radium co-founder and lead artist on the spots, says Radium came to the project by way of frequent collaborator and editor Jay Herda at Mad River Post in San Francisco. "He cut the Career Builder spots for last year's Super Bowl spots and this year's spots. They are very funny spots. They were beautifully shot in the forests around Vancouver. There are all metaphors like being dragged into a meeting is the equivalent of falling into a pit in the middle of a jungle. Or if an office manager herds you up for some meeting and you end up running off a cliff because you can't stand the meeting."

Radium shot a plate of a ravine and then people running. Hundreds of CG people were created to match the real people. The switch happens when the real people run behind a tree and CG people fly off the cliff like lemmings.

"From the effects standpoint, it's not a big effects job per se but there are a lot of individual pieces that work in there," he continues. "The biggest spot was really Darts. There is one shot where all these people are running off a cliff at the end of the spot. We shot a plate of a ravine and then had practical people running out at the plateau of the ravine. There was a fence on the edge of the ravine and of course they didn't jump over the edge, but stopped at the fence. We had to continue the people in the wide shot running and jumping off the edge of the cliff. Firstly, we had to clean up the cliff because of the fence. Then there was a piece of rock that was ugly so we did some matte painting work to clean it all up. We then created hundreds of CG people that matched the real people. The real people run behind a tree that we added and at that point they are switched to CG people and are little creatures that fly off the cliff like lemmings. There is a bunch of other stuff too, like the employers are on horseback up in the hills and they come running down to herd everybody up for a meeting. They are firing these blow darts that are actually ballpoint pens that come flying through the air. We added all the pens.

"In another spot, Promotion Pit, it's like a Gladiator take with his big fight for a promotion. Everybody is battling one another and they are wearing office furniture as shields with binders and such. We added burning flames to a mop the janitor was flailing around. There is another spot called Performance Evaluation, where there is a guy walking on a bed of burning coals. Of course, they weren't really burning but we had to make them look like it, so we added the glowing flames and coals. It was a lot of CG and Inferno and Maya. There was also another shot where a man is getting a giant wedgie and another man is hanging from a tree from his underpants. Unfortunately at that time of day we were losing a lot of light, so there was a lot of color correction and isolation work. We had to bring out the underwear -- digital underwear enhancement," he laughs. "There is also another shot of a guy falling out of a tree and binder clips are being clipped to his nipples and stomach. We didn't have any clips on his back, so I had to add a bunch of digital clips to his back as he walks out of frame. We also had to do all the compositing when he falls from the tree because he falls behind a receptionist desk so we had to composite the receptionist in the foreground.

"Another spot was The New Guy, and this new guy is dropped from the sky in a helicopter into a clearing, while the older employees are looking on. He gets attacked by the older employees and his clothes are all ripped off. We added the helicopter and him hanging below the helicopter before he is dropped. In the last spot 'Doughnuts,' the premise is that there are meetings, which are actually pits in the ground and they are baited with doughnuts. We added the doughnuts spinning up into the air for a comedic touch. We also added an ice cream cake in the middle of the jungle. The one they shot was too small so we created a big one. It was really a lot of little things that added up to a lot of work. I think it was about 30-35 shots for all the spots."

Proud of the campaign and their work, Mowbray adds, "We are very enthused to be working on Super Bowl spots like these because they are very funny. In some respects, even they might not be huge effect spots like the spots are, I think they will have more impact because they are so funny and they have humanity to them. The nice thing is that the vfx add to the spots, and aren't just effects for effects sake. For Radium, it's definitely good for the profile."