The Mill created Queen of Hearts for Careerbuilder.com. It’s a literal and graphic representation of a woman’s heart jumping out of her body. The Mill needed to make the organ look photoreal without being gross. Courtesy of The Mill.

Well, the big game has been played and New Yorkers can smile victoriously through the winter while New Englanders will most likely weep sadly into their cold beers. As always with the Super Bowl, there is a loser and most definitely some big winners. Yeah, the Giants get the big bragging rights as Super Bowl champs, but there are plenty of other winners especially in the hotly contested advertising arena.

The Super Bowl represents another epic confrontation of the far less bone-crunching kind as television commercials also go to battle in their attempts to wow audiences during the game breaks with big laughs, impressive visual effects sequences or just plain clever pitches. Year after year, the stakes get higher and technology, in the form of visual effects, takes more of a role in bringing the most mind-boggling ad campaigns to life. VFXWorld.com takes our annual deeper look at some of the more impressive spots that premiered at Super Bowl 2008 and talks to the vfx houses that brought them to life, including: Filmworkers Club, Framestore NY, The Mill, ka-chew! and Method.

CareerBuilder: Queen of Hearts and Firefly
Online job portal Careerbuilder.com launched their new “Start Building” campaign with two spots that appeal to unhappy workers urging them to start following their dreams by leaving their soul killing jobs behind. Two vfx houses worked on the two spots: The Mill on Queen of Hearts and ka-chew! on Firefly. TWC Films director Suthon Petchsuwan shot both spots and then with agency W&K, Portland’s sanction, he selected the post houses that he wanted to bring across his vision.

Heart is a rather literal and graphic representation of a woman’s heart jumping out of her body to rather brazenly march into the slovenly boss’ office to state “I Quit!” The Mill was hired to work on the spot and Senior VFX Producer Victoria Kendal tells VFXWorld that “the initial brief to us was that [the heart] needed to look photoreal. Originally, they thought about going for a puppeteer approach with the heart but I think the timeline prevented that. They were concerned the heart not be gross and revolting but comical and endearing. For us it was a lot of fun to work on the project to give characterization to something that normally wouldn’t have those behaviors.”

Kendal says they got their overall reference look from Suthon but adds, “We refined the more human characteristics like the fact that it sort of had arms. It also has these little legs that have to appear and grow out of it. While it was based in reality, we had to take some license in terms of how the model was built, the proportions and that it walked. We went through two or three passes on where the valves were and how thick or thin the legs were or if it would have shoes before we ended up with the look. We also had a fair bit of back and forth in terms of the texture, the coloring, how fleshy and wet it looked, even down to the fat deposits.”

The Mill’s work took two-and-a-half months to complete with four CG artists and an overall team of 12 to get the spot done. “It went smoothly,” Kendal admits. “The one shot we spent a lot of time working on is when the little heart pulls out because they wanted him to have attitude and be very defiant. They wanted him to have a hero stance.” She also adds with a laugh that Suthon would have liked it to be much gorier, so there is a director’s version where there is blood seen on the actor’s face and there are bloody footprints. We’re really happy with the technical execution but we feel like the character really came to life. He has the charm and the surprise factor that we all wanted.”

Meanwhile, Firefly takes a darkly humorous twist by showing a 2D- animated firefly musically encouraging an unhappy worker by serenade to dream bigger, only to find the happy little bug getting eaten by a 3D spider. EP Creative Director John Andrews explains that Suthon “chose us because he knew we had both the 2D and 3D skills in house. He also saw some spots by our 2D Animation Director Elliot Bour, who had a background in traditional full character animation.”