It took over two months for The Mill to complete the spot with four CG artists and an overall team of 12. The texture, coloring, how fleshy and wet the heart looked, and the fat deposits were all discussed. Courtesy of The Mill.

When they started production on the design for the firefly character, Andrews says the goal “was to have him look as bug-like as possible but also be as sweet and endearing as possible as a fairy god-like figure.”

ka-chew! details that they had a month to finish the spot. VFX Supervisor Lochlon Johnston explains, “It was all storyboarded out and revolved around the plates shot on set. Our job was simple in placing 2D and 3D characters into the scenes shot. It was broken down into the 2D firefly and the 3D spider. The 2D side was locked down pretty early because of the process in creating it. On the 3D side, we went through a lot of rounds of different animations. We redid most of the animation a day or two before we delivered.” Sr. Producer Michaela Zerbib continues, “Ultimately they came back at the last minute with a new creative idea. 24-hours prior to delivery we were given a creative direction that we ended up using in the spot.” Andrews further expounds “that the nice thing about CG is that once you have created your Maya model, then it’s all built and you can do something different with the model. The way we accomplished the combination of 2D and 3D was that the 3D spider when he captures the 2D firefly, that firefly is actually a CG character that these guys modeled and toon shaded so it would look like the same character in 2D. The reason for that is that the interaction between the two has to be so perfect that we would never have been able to make those changes otherwise.”

In the end, Johnston says, “We were surprised at how much attention it got. I think with the combination of 2D and 3D, there’s not a lot of places that do that and we are really happy to do that work so hopefully this will generate more interest in combining these mediums.”

Budweiser: Team, Ability to Fly and Breathe Fire
Budweiser has long been players in the Super Bowl ad game usually going with both humorous and heart-string campaigns to appeal to a range of beer drinkers. They stayed to the model splitting their themes into the two camps. Midwest post facility Filmworkers Club landed the job to create the vfx on all the spots and they explain their approaches to each campaign.

For Clydesdale Team, which features a Dalmatian training a Clydesdale to pull the famed Budweiser wagon while the Rocky theme blares, artist Rob Churchill explains that they created the environments that Hank the horse runs through. “We created entire environments,” he details in Filmworkers Club production notes. “To get just the right look in one of the winter scenes, I painted the falling snow and animated some of it by hand. It was important that the viewer see the passing seasons during the training montage of Hank, the Clydesdale. The film was all shot in California within the span of one week. It was visually all summertime. So, I simply started with matte paintings to show just how far certain shots could be altered. By the time we were satisfied, we had replaced the entire surroundings of nine scenes, foreground and background. Only Hank remained. The end results are simply gorgeous!”

ka-chew! created the Firefly spot for Careerbuilder.com. ka-chew!’s goal was to have it look as bug-like as possible but also be as sweet and endearing as possible as a fairy god-like figure. Courtesy of ka-chew!

Meanwhile, the comedy campaign spots Ability to Fly and Breathe Fire focused on the wacky outcomes of new powers that come to Bud Light drinkers. Fly shows a thrilled Bud Light drinker soaring through the air before he is sucked into the engine of a jet plane. Again, Churchill and the Filmworks team created the shot with a mix of greenscreen compositing, 3D modeling for the plane and the addition of clouds and reflections. For Fire, the spot showed a man accidentally setting his date’s cat on fire with his heated breath. Churchill describes in the production notes, “We had a lot of special effects work and we came through -- Breathe Fire alone took a week,” due to the fire and smoke elements put into the spot.

FedEx: Carrier Pigeons
What would happen if the world chose to hire Godzilla sized carrier pigeons for its shipping needs? That’s the visual joke explored in FedEx’s Carrier Pigeons spot, which features over-sized, helmeted birds wreaking havoc on a city and its citizens. Framestore NY was given the task to make the concept fly. In a release Framestore’s VFX Supervisor/Head of 3D, David Hulin, explains that they chose not to shoot actual birds against greenscreen but actually 3D model and animate their own birds. “It was a daring move, but we knew we could bring a lot to the animation and really make these look and feel like 15-foot, half-ton, genetically engineered creatures. As any 3D artist will tell you, feathers can be very challenging and this job was certainly no exception. We created the heavily feathered Hippogriff in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, but that involved 100 people working for a year. For this spot, we had to take all that CG knowledge and technology and apply it to an eight-week schedule. The spot is also in HD, which leaves no room for error. Managing 30,000 feathers on each bird was difficult to create and coordinate. And if it doesn't work, it looks awful!"