CGnews
June 15th, 2007, 09:36 AM
10642Featuring animated 3D VFX unlike anything Framestore CFC has come up with before, Neon Girl is an amazing new, all CG spot for Shine soap from Lux. Created by Buenos Aires based agency Santo for the Argentinean market, though other territories are also being planned for, the 60-second spot was directed by Daniel Kleinman for Rattling Stick.
The outline below describes the action of the spot, but that really doesn't begin to describe what the viewer sees. Imagine, on a city rooftop, the most complex neon sign you've ever seen, one that tells an entire story by switching lights on and off in sequence. Characters, action and environments - all CG neon bulbs, all precisely placed on an intricate virtual hoarding. Words really don't do the visual magic justice - run the QuickTime and see for yourself.
http://www.vfxtalk.com/images/articles04/fs_clientsname_1.jpg (http://www.framestore-cfc.com/press/07pr/070614lux/mov.html)
Click Here to View the Video! (http://www.framestore-cfc.com/press/07pr/070614lux/mov.html)
The tale is one of a bad day redeemed by a luxurious bath, and followed by a great night out. We open at dusk, on a neon hoarding high above a cityscape. We see our heroine - a neon waitress - holding her tray and waving cheerfully from the side of the building. Disaster strikes, as her right arm bulbs blow. Distraught, she heads for home, suffering further indignities en route, as she's splashed by a passing car (causing a second blown light) and trips over. Once home, she quickly slips off her clothes and climbs into her bath. Refreshed by her ablutions, she heads out for a spot of night life, drawing appreciative glances as she goes. She catches the eye of a cowboy, who whips out his lasso and pulls her to him. They hit it off and head for the local dance palace for a night of dancing and romance, as the camera pulls back to reveal another (non-neon) hoarding featuring a large image of the product.
Light Touch Required
One early idea from the agency was to actually construct the billboard for real, something that would have been both ruinously expensive and nigh impossible to achieve in a single take. Instead, an all CG process offered the chance to create a 'perfect' take, as if everything - from virtual film crew to blown lights - were working together in total synchronisation.
"This was a major project for us, in particular because of the contribution we made to the production design," says Dale Newton, Senior Animator with Framestore CFC's Commercials 3D team, and Production Designer for Neon Girl. "When we got the job there was a basic storyboard which laid out the narrative, but no designs. In the first months of production, we established a look to the neon drawings which Danny and Santo approved of."
http://www.vfxtalk.com/images/articles04/fs_clientsname_2.jpg
One of the first things we did was to create a very rough animatic purely for the agency, roughly outlining what we needed to achieve. That ran at three minutes long, and one of the first challenges was to work out how to get the story into 60 seconds whilst keeping it legible and coherent. Additionally, telling the story in one continuous camera move, economy was crucial. Initially, we tended to over-animate, discovering that instead of using, say, four or more drawings per second, the story could be told with two. And to make the most of those 2 drawings, their staging and timing had to be perfect. We had to think like neon sign designers, not animators!"
http://www.vfxtalk.com/images/articles04/fs_clientsname_3.jpg
Let There Be Lights
Overall, Newton spent some 6 months on Neon Girl, which includes a couple of months on inspirational design, through the early animatic work, to full production and delivery. "It didn't feel like an animation project, more like a film making project. It was more of a creative challenge than a technical one, from my point of view," he says, adding with a smile, "Though Diarmid - who handled the lighting - might have a different take on it."
Diarmid Harrison-Murray, Senior TD, concurs. "The process we developed was interesting, actually," he says, "Dale started off by sketching everything on paper, and this was converted into vector art using Toon Boom, a vector animation package. From Toon Boom the work went through Flash which gave us a file format that enables getting this 2d curve animation into Houdini.
In Houdini we'd put the animated curves through a feedback loop to generate all of the neons, whether they were on or off, and then we'd reapply their animation back on top of that to tell us which tubes should switch on at which point. So as well as the lighting and rendering, we were building all of the geometry of the neon tubes."
Because of the evolving nature of the project, a fairly automatic, procedural process was desirable. The elements couldn't be hand-modelled, because one change to the animation or design would mean everything would have to be done again. Explains Harrison-Murray, "The system we developed allowed us to plug the 2d animated curves at one end and get out neon tubes at the other end complete with all their bolts and trimming and a suitable amount of natural variation in appearance and behaviour: a controllable but automatic process. We had to monitor this and keep an eye out for bugs - but we got a smooth pipeline going eventually."
One of the big challenges in lighting this spot was the question of 'indirect illumination'. In this case all the light cast by the neon lights and bounced around by their surroundings. With a lighting set-up this huge, quite a bit of time had to be spent optimising a system that would give the indirect illumination and reflections needed, without bringing the render farm to its knees. Says Harrison-Murray, "We were rendering with Renderman, which has various systems in place to help you deal with a ton of geometry without running out of memory. In addition, the reality of production demands means that providing the result looks great, elegant fakery is quite acceptable."
The architecture behind the look, the series of rendered passes which create every facet and nuance of light behaviour was devised by Harrison-Murray. Once prepared, these passes were handed to Inferno artist Tim Osborne who prepared the final image, adjusting colour values, brightness and contrast to ensure that the neons read correctly against the evening sky.
Once again, Framestore CFC's Commercials 3D team have raised their game. Neon Girl has already been widely recognised as a strikingly original piece of CG work, pushing back the boundaries of CG representation and garnering interest and admiration around the world in the process.
Lux (Shine) 'Neon Girl'
Client Unilever
Agency Santo
General Creative Directors Maximiliano Anselmo / Sebastian Wilhelm
Copywriters Matias Ballada / Sebastian Wilhelm
Art Director Maximiliano Anselmo
Head of Production Facundo Perez
Agency Producers Andres Salmoyraghi
Production Company Rattling Stick
Director Daniel Kleinman
Executive Production Johnnie Frankel
For Framestore CFC
Production Design Dale Newton
Design Sylvain Marc
Animators Dale Newton, Sylvain Marc
Additional Animation Florent de La Taille
Senior Technical Director Diarmid Harrison-Murray
Technical Directors Guillame Fradin, David Mellor
Junior Technical Director Paul Jones
Modelling Mary Swinnerton
Snr Compositing Artist Tim Osborne
Producer Scott Griffin
http://www.framestore-cfc.com
The outline below describes the action of the spot, but that really doesn't begin to describe what the viewer sees. Imagine, on a city rooftop, the most complex neon sign you've ever seen, one that tells an entire story by switching lights on and off in sequence. Characters, action and environments - all CG neon bulbs, all precisely placed on an intricate virtual hoarding. Words really don't do the visual magic justice - run the QuickTime and see for yourself.
http://www.vfxtalk.com/images/articles04/fs_clientsname_1.jpg (http://www.framestore-cfc.com/press/07pr/070614lux/mov.html)
Click Here to View the Video! (http://www.framestore-cfc.com/press/07pr/070614lux/mov.html)
The tale is one of a bad day redeemed by a luxurious bath, and followed by a great night out. We open at dusk, on a neon hoarding high above a cityscape. We see our heroine - a neon waitress - holding her tray and waving cheerfully from the side of the building. Disaster strikes, as her right arm bulbs blow. Distraught, she heads for home, suffering further indignities en route, as she's splashed by a passing car (causing a second blown light) and trips over. Once home, she quickly slips off her clothes and climbs into her bath. Refreshed by her ablutions, she heads out for a spot of night life, drawing appreciative glances as she goes. She catches the eye of a cowboy, who whips out his lasso and pulls her to him. They hit it off and head for the local dance palace for a night of dancing and romance, as the camera pulls back to reveal another (non-neon) hoarding featuring a large image of the product.
Light Touch Required
One early idea from the agency was to actually construct the billboard for real, something that would have been both ruinously expensive and nigh impossible to achieve in a single take. Instead, an all CG process offered the chance to create a 'perfect' take, as if everything - from virtual film crew to blown lights - were working together in total synchronisation.
"This was a major project for us, in particular because of the contribution we made to the production design," says Dale Newton, Senior Animator with Framestore CFC's Commercials 3D team, and Production Designer for Neon Girl. "When we got the job there was a basic storyboard which laid out the narrative, but no designs. In the first months of production, we established a look to the neon drawings which Danny and Santo approved of."
http://www.vfxtalk.com/images/articles04/fs_clientsname_2.jpg
One of the first things we did was to create a very rough animatic purely for the agency, roughly outlining what we needed to achieve. That ran at three minutes long, and one of the first challenges was to work out how to get the story into 60 seconds whilst keeping it legible and coherent. Additionally, telling the story in one continuous camera move, economy was crucial. Initially, we tended to over-animate, discovering that instead of using, say, four or more drawings per second, the story could be told with two. And to make the most of those 2 drawings, their staging and timing had to be perfect. We had to think like neon sign designers, not animators!"
http://www.vfxtalk.com/images/articles04/fs_clientsname_3.jpg
Let There Be Lights
Overall, Newton spent some 6 months on Neon Girl, which includes a couple of months on inspirational design, through the early animatic work, to full production and delivery. "It didn't feel like an animation project, more like a film making project. It was more of a creative challenge than a technical one, from my point of view," he says, adding with a smile, "Though Diarmid - who handled the lighting - might have a different take on it."
Diarmid Harrison-Murray, Senior TD, concurs. "The process we developed was interesting, actually," he says, "Dale started off by sketching everything on paper, and this was converted into vector art using Toon Boom, a vector animation package. From Toon Boom the work went through Flash which gave us a file format that enables getting this 2d curve animation into Houdini.
In Houdini we'd put the animated curves through a feedback loop to generate all of the neons, whether they were on or off, and then we'd reapply their animation back on top of that to tell us which tubes should switch on at which point. So as well as the lighting and rendering, we were building all of the geometry of the neon tubes."
Because of the evolving nature of the project, a fairly automatic, procedural process was desirable. The elements couldn't be hand-modelled, because one change to the animation or design would mean everything would have to be done again. Explains Harrison-Murray, "The system we developed allowed us to plug the 2d animated curves at one end and get out neon tubes at the other end complete with all their bolts and trimming and a suitable amount of natural variation in appearance and behaviour: a controllable but automatic process. We had to monitor this and keep an eye out for bugs - but we got a smooth pipeline going eventually."
One of the big challenges in lighting this spot was the question of 'indirect illumination'. In this case all the light cast by the neon lights and bounced around by their surroundings. With a lighting set-up this huge, quite a bit of time had to be spent optimising a system that would give the indirect illumination and reflections needed, without bringing the render farm to its knees. Says Harrison-Murray, "We were rendering with Renderman, which has various systems in place to help you deal with a ton of geometry without running out of memory. In addition, the reality of production demands means that providing the result looks great, elegant fakery is quite acceptable."
The architecture behind the look, the series of rendered passes which create every facet and nuance of light behaviour was devised by Harrison-Murray. Once prepared, these passes were handed to Inferno artist Tim Osborne who prepared the final image, adjusting colour values, brightness and contrast to ensure that the neons read correctly against the evening sky.
Once again, Framestore CFC's Commercials 3D team have raised their game. Neon Girl has already been widely recognised as a strikingly original piece of CG work, pushing back the boundaries of CG representation and garnering interest and admiration around the world in the process.
Lux (Shine) 'Neon Girl'
Client Unilever
Agency Santo
General Creative Directors Maximiliano Anselmo / Sebastian Wilhelm
Copywriters Matias Ballada / Sebastian Wilhelm
Art Director Maximiliano Anselmo
Head of Production Facundo Perez
Agency Producers Andres Salmoyraghi
Production Company Rattling Stick
Director Daniel Kleinman
Executive Production Johnnie Frankel
For Framestore CFC
Production Design Dale Newton
Design Sylvain Marc
Animators Dale Newton, Sylvain Marc
Additional Animation Florent de La Taille
Senior Technical Director Diarmid Harrison-Murray
Technical Directors Guillame Fradin, David Mellor
Junior Technical Director Paul Jones
Modelling Mary Swinnerton
Snr Compositing Artist Tim Osborne
Producer Scott Griffin
http://www.framestore-cfc.com