Framestore CFC's animators have created some new characters for the new Vauxhall spots, FOLLOW THAT CAR and GET UP & GO. Created by agency DLKW, directed by Dom and Nic and produced by John Madsen for Outsider, the two :40 spots begin airing in the U.K. this week.
Featuring the urban adventures of a gang of five fabric puppets, the spots are the culmination of a couple of month's worth of oblique marketing devices. Virals (also created by Framestore CFC), websites and an MTV presence have all been used, without any branding attaching to the puppets, all with the aim of getting the characters collectively known as The C'mons onto the public's radar.
Over the last couple of years, the collaborations between directing team Dom and Nic and Framestore CFC have produced some innovative, multi award-winning projects. These have included the animated paper cutout, Hector, for Renault, and a menacing automaton for the Chemical Bros.' Believe promo. So when Dom & Nic needed someone who would be able to offer them all the freedoms they've come to expect from CG animation, but requiring a look that would usually be achieved with real figures, they returned to Framestore CFC and to frequent collaborator vfx supervisor Ben Cronin.
First, let's meet the cast. Red, Blue, White, Cherri and Moo are three guys and two girls. Despite their unconventional appearance, they are much like any other twenty-somethings. They enjoy hanging out together, adventures and partying. Barcelona-based artist Boris Hoppek, who uses a variety of soft fabrics to create his strange little people, designed the characters.
FOLLOW THAT CAR opens with Cherri (who's a bit of a wild one) and Blue (the cool, popular one) canoodling in a park. A Corsa passes them, catching Pink's eye, and she jumps off Blue to give chase, with Blue finding himself taken for a scrap of rubbish by a park cleaner and binned. In a similar fashion, Red, Moo and White also suffer mishaps as a result of being distracted by the passing Vauxhall. The spot closes with the five of them finally catching up with the Corsa. As it revolves inside a showroom, a model seated on the bonnet, they stare in from the street, pressing their fabric faces against the glass.
GET UP & GO sees the gang assembling for a night on the town. Blue has acquired a suitable runabout (i.e. the Corsa) and is collecting his friends en route to a nightclub. He stops outside Red's distinctly bachelor-tinged flat and calls him down. The journey continues with the girls being collected from their high-rise apartment. The gang arrives outside the club and a roller-skating hostess approaches red and gives him a balloon. Sadly for our diminutive hero, the balloon proves too buoyant, and he is lifted into the night sky. The gang jumps back in the Corsa and set off in pursuit.
"A big benefit of CG, in addition to the flexibility it offers the creative team," said Cronin, "is that it speeds up the shoot immensely."
The shoot for the two TV spots took place in Barcelona a few months ago. After a brief reconnaissance, Cronin and supervising technical director Jake Mengers spent several days getting the material they needed. This included some quite tricky elements. For example, a shot that features the girls running through some bead curtains was lit in such a way that the shadows were going to present problems. Mengers came up with some nice interactions by throwing beanbags through the curtains, but Cronin still had to rebuild the shadows by hand in Inferno. The plates for the virals were shot more swiftly, on mini-DV, over a couple of days in London.
"Dom and Nic stood back a bit more than usual on this one," added Cronin. "They let us get on with it, I think, because they've grown to trust our work." Our 3D team were just fantastic on this project. Keeping the C'mons looking good proved to be very demanding, particularly in close-ups. They were always willing to go the extra mile in order to get it perfect."
Senior animator Dale Newton offers that it was two months of joy. In terms of latitude for movement and gesture, compared to a lot of the creature work we do, these characters offered a lot more freedom."
The C'mons were initially planned as smaller beings, but the necessity of them being able to look over a steering wheel meant that they ended up being around two-foot tall. Said Newton, "The main point of the brief was that they were not to be 'animated' characters it's about stuff happening in the real world. They needed to look as if they were puppets slightly clunky, perhaps, and vaguely as if they were being controlled, but able to do things that they could never do were they being manipulated with wires or strings. This is a thread that goes through every animated collaboration we've done for Dom and Nic, really. If it's made from paper it should feel like a piece of paper would; if they're stuffed cloth, like the C'mons, then make them flop around a bit. Plus they have these huge heads. I intuited a lot about their movements from their appearance.
"We did a lot of work on the animation even before the shoot. We worked up a rough animation rig and started putting it through some run cycles. Just playing around with these gave us a good starting point for the characters. The challenge at this point was not only to work up an appropriate puppet style of animation, but a style that would be appropriate to each individual. Imbuing each puppet with character was important for us every step of the way."
One nice aspect that emerged from the team's work was that the puppets were built to work the same way they do in real life. If you moved the arms or any other part of them the cloth creased automatically (via about 80 blendshapes per puppet). This extended rigging time a fair bit, but made sure that in the majority of the more than 60 shots (excluding close ups), the technical aspects of the character rigs looked after themselves.
For senior technical director Simon Stoney, a central challenge was getting the knitting and stitching to look right. "There were several fabrics involved: knitting, velvet, normal cloth, plus lots of stitching. I hadn't tried to do something like this before, and I had to work out how to do it without building every single stitch. I had a few weeks R&D time at the beginning, so I built some knitting geometry in Maya and then used that as a displacement map. I then mapped that back onto a plain mesh and moved the mesh around as the puppet would move and this seemed to work quite well. I added a bump map, color map and did some lighting tests bingo!
"We did the work in Maya, Shake and used Zbrushto paint a lot of the creasing. In order to do it as well as we needed to, we had to do some extra creasing into the actual displacement maps on a frame- by-frame basis for some shots."
The final Framestore CFC touch for the two spots was the telecine, created by Dave Ludlam. "Both spots needed an urban feel natural and not too polished," he said. "Although GET UP AND GO had a bit more gloss, to capture that night-life vibe."
Framestore CFC credits include:* VFX Supervisor / Lead Compositor: Ben Cronin* Animation Supervisor: Dale Newton* Lead TD, FOLLOW THAT CAR: Simon Stoney* Lead TD, GET UP & GO: Jamie Isles* 3D Animators: Nicklas Andersson, Matt Everitt, Michael Mellor* TDs: Laura Dias, Paul Denhard, Alex Doyle, Simon French, Diarmid Harrison-Murray, James Healy, Paul Jones* 3D Shoot Supervision: Jake Mengers* Compositor: Chris Redding* Telecine: David Ludlam* Producer: Sarah Hiddlestone
London-based Framestore CFC (www.framestore-cfc.com) is one of the leading visual effects companies working on effects for feature films and commercials. Recent film work includes X-MEN: THE LAST STAND, SUPERMAN RETURNS, V FOR VENDETTA and HARRY POTTER AND THE GOBLET OF FIRE.
Rick DeMott
Animation World Network
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