New York-based digital design house Charlex produced particle effects work for Captain America of the Visa spot. Since a larger-than-life look was the goal, the need for realistic effects was balanced with comic-book sensibilities. Courtesy of Visa.

One creative challenge for Spider-Man was to tweak the way he’d been portrayed in movies and cartoons. “We needed to come up with a believable look for him that didn’t look like something that was already done,” Mann says. “We also needed this look to match the live-action footage of the stuntman in costume.”

To meet budget and time constraints, the CG team at Charlex painstakingly measured the actor as well as the stunt man so they could start building the character prior to the shoot. A character pipeline system was created in Maya to update the CG Spider-Man model and look without needing to alter the animation. This allowed for the animating to begin before live action.

‘Bear’ Necessities
Quiet Man, whose past work includes the Pepsi Twist Osbournes and Pepsi Britney Spears spots, sought to fuse fun and realism for the FedEx spot starring Burt Reynolds and an acrobatic bear, whereas the focus for Budweiser’s Clydesdale snowball fight was primarily about the latter so that the average viewer might actually think the horses were capable of rolling their own snowballs.

The FedEx premise is about as tongue-in-cheek as it gets, with analysts wryly suggesting the package-delivery company can score a touchdown with fans of Super Bowl ads by featuring animals and celebrities.

Quiet Man paired Burt Reynolds and an acrobatic bear for a FedEx spot. SOFTIMAGE|XSI was used to offer a highly realistic portrayal of hair and animal fur. © BBDO. Courtesy of Quiet Man Inc.

Reynolds was nearly paired with an elephant until it was later determined that the bearded actor’s head would have wound up in the beast’s crotch during the leg-standing maneuver because of its enormous girth. “In the end,” Taylor says, “we decided on a bear, which can stand in a human-like way and at least lend itself to an air of believability.”

Since there wasn’t enough time to construct an entirely photoreal character in 3D, Quiet Man enhanced the movements of a real-life bear with CG paws, feet and facial expressions such as a wrinkled nose and also used rig removal. “You get the animal to perform to the best of its ability and then you start to animate the CG limbs to get the performance you’re looking for,” she explains. The vfx house even has an entire show reel devoted to the “party-crasher” trend wherein CG characters literally crash into live-action.

SOFTIMAGE|XSI was used to offer a highly realistic portrayal of hair and animal fur -- two of the most demanding elements for artists to capture. “I have people back here writing additional code for the main program to get the hair to do what we want it to do, so it’s incredibly labor-intensive for us,” according to Taylor. “Just to render it at the level you want is so complicated. You’re sitting there with a stopwatch to see how long it will take to render just one frame.”