Press release from Framestore:

Framestore recently completed VFX work on an epic Pepsi commercial that sees San Sebastian’s beach play host to a massive party, with DJ Calvin Harris at the helm. But the star power doesn’t end there; also at the party are world class footballers – Aguero, Drogba, Lampard, Messi, Torres and Wilshere – who indulge in a game of football above the crowd whilst supported by thousands of partygoers.

Framestore’s team of 20 VFX artists – spanning crowd specialists, Nuke compositors, roto artists, animators and technical directors – worked across the production for four months in order to deliver the commercial’s demanding and complex VFX whilst meeting all clients’ high expectations. In the words of David Foulds, PepsiCo International’s Vice President Advertising: “To say that we are delighted with the final product would be an understatement.”

Framestore created a new proprietary crowd system in order to fulfill the commercial’s massive scale. The system, developed by Diarmid Harrison-Murray and Martin Aufinger, was built in Houdini using mo-cap data captured at Framestore’s in-house motion capture facility.

The crowd system is specifically designed to meet the needs of commercial projects. It allows a more efficient shot turnaround and gives the artist greater control over the crowds behaviour and look, down to details such as outfit, hairstyle, props and more. Using Houdini’s native renderer, Mantra, allowed artists to set up agents quicker and use more complex lighting techniques on selected parts of the crowd whilst still being able to render thousands of background people within the same setup.

Framestore’s new crowd system allows shots to be laid out quickly using an instancing approach, without having to simulate each agent separately. This meant VFX artists could show the director many iterations of the crowd layout in a relatively short amount of time.

Once the rough layout is approved, it is then possible to split off parts of the crowd that require bespoke behaviours, adding more layers of sophistication, in this case taking it to a level of detail where hands could dynamically grab footballers’ feet and even hold flashing camera phones. This custom-built system became invaluable for creating realistic looking scenes.

As Aufinger explains: “The fun part of a crowd job is when you suddenly notice unusually strange, almost disturbing behaviour of one or two agents of a CG crowd. Luckily, we were easily able to quickly eliminate those offending agents!”

By merging the ability to layout a crowd quickly with a technique that enabled pinpointing of individual sections for more bespoke animation, the end results looked utterly authentic but were created with an efficiency that gave Framestore’s team more time to focus on improving more relevant parts of shots, thus freeing them from waiting for time consuming simulations.

One key advantage of this approach over shooting live action crowd plates is that the lighting and atmosphere enveloping the crowd could be altered at any stage of the post process. As a result, this system has now become Framestore’s de-facto crowd system for commercial projects and several other departments have already shown great interest in using it. The modular nature of the system means that additional features can be easily added as future projects require.