S4 Studios has designed and produced a :45 fully-animated 3D promo for NBC Universal HD's 22-hour broadcast of Al Gore's LIVE EARTH, dubbed "the concert for a climate in crisis."
Created by the S4 team of director Geoffrey Kater, producer Larry Le Francis and creative director Thomas Helmintoller, the promo, titled 7.7.07, takes viewers on a grand tour through seven venues of the worldwide concert event on July 7, 2007.
The coverage features more than 150 of the world's most popular bands, who will play live to an expected audience of over two billion people taking it all in on cable, internet and radio. The event is also the launch of the Live Earth "Call to Action," which will ask the audience to support a seven-point pledge of monetary support and personal action to cut global warming pollution by 90%, in time for future generations to inherit a healthy planet.
"The challenge from Universal HD was to create a promo that would create excitement for the telecast and at the same time, drive home an awareness through music of what was going to happen if we all don't answer the SOS from our planet," said Kater. "It had to convey a lot of information about each venue in a very short time."
The piece opens on a metallic-looking Morse S.O.S code, which rotates around to reveal the Earth from space as a desert-like, pollution-shrouded globe. It then flashes through a series of one of a kind graphic representations of each host city, slowing down just long enough at each --New York, London, Johannesburg, Sydney, Hamburg, Tokyo, Rio de Janeiro --before retreating rapidly out into space, once again revealing the Earth, restored to its pristine state, as crackling energy, polar caps and plant life spring forth from the now-healed globe.
"We wanted to show visually how the Earth can be healed through the power of awareness, which is the entire point of Live Earth," added Kater "The word 'organic' gets tossed around a lot in design work, but this project really was unabashedly organic in more ways than one. There is of course the obvious theme of the event, but we also hit on the idea of using the representative native plant life in each city as a device, not only for moving from one part of the world to another, but also as a great way to show at least a partial list of the groups performing in each venue. Sarah Pierce and her team at NBC Universal's Emerging Networks division was a great client; they had the confidence to give us free reign to tackle the problem with some rather unique design solutions."
Presentation storyboards were created using Wacom's Cintiq interactive pen display, then animated using LightWave 7 and Adobe After Effects. "The Cintiq is one of the coolest new tools I've ever used, because it allows me to do pencil and color right away, avoiding the roughness usually associated with pitch boards," Kater stated. "This way, if the client is satisfied, I can go right in and do style frames, and that saves a lot of time better spent in production."
Additional S4 Studios credits include artist/animator Sarah Keturah, 3D modeler/animator Ken Wilder and 3D modeler Don McCoy.
S4 Studios LLC (www.s4studios.com) is a creative design and production studio specializing in entertainment branding, content development, 3D animation, visual effects and live-action production for television, feature films, commercials, trailers and home entertainment. Since its founding in 1999, the studio has built a client roster that includes NBC Universal, Cartoon Network, Flyer One Ent., 20th Century Fox, Paramount Studios and more.
Bill Desowitz, former editor of VFXWorld, is currently the Crafts Editor of IndieWire.
