Rhinoceros Visual Effects and Design has created the visual effects for a new New York State Lottery 30-second spot. In "Talking Mule," a live-action talking donkey ponders why miners bother panning for gold when all they need to do is play New York Lottery's "24K" game. Rhinoceros developed a highly efficient new system of simulating speech for "Talking Mule" that called for Inferno compositing, rather than the standard CGI work. "Inferno gave us the ability to integrate and manipulate live-action elements quickly and naturally," said Bill Mahler, visual effects supervisor/partner for Rhinoceros. "It's an extremely robust platform that allows us to bring together the live-action elements, play them in real time, and then morph, stretch and reanimate the animal's features. By making the lip motion synchronous with the words in this way, the result was a highly realistic illusion of speech. If we had done it in the time-tested CGI method, it would have meant completely rebuilding the donkey's head and lining those motions up frame by frame with the live-action elements. Our Inferno techniques gave us equally realistic results, and saved considerable time in light of a tight schedule." Bennet Lieber served as the producer for Rhinoceros Visual Effects & Design. The commercial was produced for Grey Advertising.
Rick DeMott
Animation World Network
Creator of Rick's Flicks Picks
