For the Emerald Nuts Boogeyman spot, Robert Goulet was shot on greenscreen and made to look as if he was hanging upside down. He was then extracted from the greenscreen and composited on the background office plate. Courtesy of Brickyard VFX.

Brickyard VFX, Emerald Nuts Boogeyman
One of the nuttiest (yes, pun intended) spots of the game was a bizarre expose on what really happens when people get sleepy in the afternoon at work. Within the spot, singer Robert Goulet is dramatized sneaking around an office wreaking havoc with supplies until he is almost discovered by an Emerald Nut lover, to which he then is seen scuttling across the ceiling to escape. The gravity defying effect was brought to life by Brickyard VFX of Santa Monica. Diana Young-Gomez, the exec producer for the Emerald Nuts spot, says the wacky original concept was a huge draw for their group. "The creative on Emerald Nuts spots is always zany so it was a fun spot to work on right out the gate. I mean who could resist working on a spot that features Goulet as the office menace?"

She says the spot was created with a tight staff of two artists, one specializing in Flame and "the effects demanded in the spot were pretty closely in line with what the agency wanted based on their final concept."

Detailing how they achieved the ceiling "crawl" for Goulet, Young-Gomez says, "Goulet was shot on greenscreen on his hands and knees on the floor. Thanks to good ol' gravity, his sweater and pant legs were hanging down toward the floor. In the Flame, Brickyard VFX Pacific co-owner and Flame artist Patrick Poulatian tucked his shirt back and inverted his pant legs so that it looked like he was actually hanging upside down from the ceiling. We then extracted him from the greenscreen and composited him on the background office plate. This shot was pretty challenging in that it required a lot of manual finessing and cleanup, other than that it was a relatively straight-forward composite." Pleased with the response generated by the ad, Young-Gomez says of the experience, "As always, we enjoy working with the folks at Goodby, who we've collaborated with on several different campaigns (Comcast, Milk, etc.) over the past couple of years."

Sway created a CGI version of the live-action robot for the GM spot Robot, using eight artists and a combination of LightWave, Studio X for the 3D effects, Flame, Photoshop and NVIDIA. All Robot images courtesy of General Motors/Deutsch LA.

Sway Studio, GM Robot
Meanwhile, Robot proved to be one of the more interesting amalgams of live action and CG technology merging for a standout spot. The GM vehicle commercial storyline revolved around a quality control robot at GM getting fired because he drops a bolt on the manufacturing line. Left to wander utterly dejected about his fate, the robot wanders the streets until he ends up on a bridge, throwing himself over the edge only to wake up and realize the entire scenario was just a horrible nightmare. While the ad earned some post game controversy because of the imagined suicide (which was slightly edited for airings after the big game due to protests), Mark Glaser, creative director at Sway Studio, says the spot provided his team and him with some clever challenges.

"We approach any project the same way but we had a little extra excitement because we knew this spot would have a much larger viewer ship than most of our work. In terms of the Super Bowl, these are the biggest ads of the year and we are very excited about being included in that.

"The spot uses photoreal effects, which we do really well," Glaser details about the spot. The major sequence of the ad comes in the last third when the robot tumbles toward his doom in the water, which was created entirely by the Sway team. "We thought the most challenging thing was going to be doing the CG water. We shot the location for the bridge sequence in downtown LA at a bridge that crosses the LA River but it's basically a trickle of a stream most of the time. It's pretty much a concrete basin and we knew we would have to fill it in with water. Water is something that can be tricky and there are three shots of it. When we started working on it, we knew what it had to look like and it came together a lot smoother than we anticipated. It had a lot to do with the artists. There's no special water tool that we use. We combine procedural textures built into any 3D software, but the planning helped. We talked about what makes water look like water and what the different layers would need to be to make it work. We came up with a plan and we followed it and it worked great."

The other major project for the spot was creating a CGI version of the live-action robot introduced in the factory. Glaser adds, "For the robot we had to match exactly the live-action shots of the real robot and the CG robot. It wasn't difficult, but it took some time to take the measurements, get it exact and photograph the real robot for textures. Once it was done, we pretty much had an exact replica of the real robot. We used about eight artists and they used a combination of LightWave, Studio X for the 3D effects, Flame, Photoshop and NVIDIA. NVIDIA Quadro-based solutions allowed us to easily work at this high level of resolution and detail in realtime, which saved us a considerable amount of time throughout the project. The length of the project was 18 days total and about a week before delivery; they changed the edit so they needed a couple more shots, which was no problem."

Glaser adds, "It says a lot that we did this one and two others Super Bowl spots this year. For a boutique studio like we are, this is pretty flattering. We hope it leads to more work like this. The artists really enjoyed it and we hope it gets a lot of recognition."

Tara DiLullo Bennett is an East coast-based writer whose articles have appeared in publications such as SCI FI Magazine, SFX and Lost Magazine. She is the author of the books 300: The Art of the Film and 24: The Official Companion Guide: Seasons 1 & 2.