It's that time of year again when VFXWorld likes to honor the Super Bowl. No, not the game, but the other VIPs of the day, namely the commercials. Game day is arguably the one day a year that audiences look forward to the ads breaking up the gridiron action and that's because Super Bowl spots are now universally recognized as the creative cream of the crop. If done right, those thirty second ads can launch products, ignite a firestorm of precious buzz or boggle audience minds with their technical wizardry.

We take a closer look at some of the spots that attracted a lot of attention and maybe even some comments of "How'd they do that?" This year we talked to artists at visual effects house Brickyard VFX, Nexus and DreamWorks Animation.

Nexus produced this Coca-Cola Avatar ad in-house with final compositing from Framestore and direction by the Oscar-nominated team of Smith & Foulkes. Courtesy of Nexus.

Coca-Cola Avatar
Coca-Cola created the Avatar spot to appeal to a new generation of Coke drinkers that balance their pixilated quality time with their real-world quality time. Nexus of London produced the spot in-house with final compositing done by Framestore.

"The spot was directed by Smith & Foulkes of Nexus and they wrote a treatment visualizing how this whole world could look," explains Ben Cowell, Nexus head of 3-D on the project. "It was quite abstract and quite difficult to express in words how it would all fit together. So for the pitch, we created a short movie showing how we would treat the avatar characters compared to the humans. We tried a lot of different things to give the characters a slightly otherworldly feel. A lot of the design work went into that initial pitch we created. Then we settled on the idea that the characters were slightly transparent and quite digital with lots of artifacts. Overall, with the characters, it's not supposed to be that all [avatars] are from one system or console. We tried to create the idea that everyone is in their individual worlds so there are a lot of styles. We had a character designer and the directors' work together looking at totally varying avatars in games and chat rooms. Overall, it was difficult because in the spot you are talking to two different audiences. One is really OK with the world and one for which it's an abstract concept."

In order to achieve the transformation effect needed, Cowell says they spent some of that pre-production time developing proprietary software that would help them down the line. "We were really lucky that it was a perfect time and one of our key people had some free time so we could throw quite a few smart people at it at the same time. We managed to develop a piece of software in time for the pitch where it created the 3-D effect when they transform and we were lucky to lock that down before we won the project."

Known for their integration of visual effects with live-action, Cowell says the spot actually was a twist on their normal approach. "We've done quite a few projects that involve a lot of live action elements. But this one is a live action project that happens to have 3-D characters in it. It was interesting to work within normal, conventional filmmaking.

"Our thought process was to treat the whole spot as a documentary rather than a splashy effects number," Cowell continues. "The idea is that if you were out with your camera filming this, what would the natural number [of avatars] be? Everything was planned as a documentary so when we were filming we often had stand-ins to look at the framing and people sat there to get the natural balance of the shots."

Breaking down the effects they created, Cowell explains, "We created something like 60 or 70 avatars which is a lot of modeling. It would have been a lot easier if they all came from the same style or world, but each one was like reinventing the job. We had about eight modelers and some had worked in games and features so we knew their strengths so everyone was given groups that they were comfortable in."