[CGnews]

When you think of Lynx deodorant do you think of the macho smelling anti-perspirant or do you think of gorgeous, pouting, scantily clad ladies? Everyone knows Lynx is all about the ladies. Lots and lots of ladies. Lynx campaigns have become legendary over the last few years with the brand picking up ten Cannes Lions amongst numerous other awards - the pressure on any new ad is tremendous.

The Mill have just finished the post production on the new Lynx commercial ‘Billions’ directed by Frederick Bond for BBH through MJZ. BBH wanted a commercial that would take the concept to the next level - one which would add a ‘wow’ factor never seen before and The Mill stepped up to the challenge.

View the spot here!

The brief was deceptively simple: following on with the ‘Spray more. Get more’ campaign, it featured Brazilian, Thai and Swedish girls flocking to a beach where a man was wildly spraying himself with the new ‘Click’ deodorant. This sounded like an easy enough challenge if they wanted say, half a dozen of each; unfortunately the creatives wanted thousands and thousands of infatuated females…

The Mill approached the challenge from two angles. The work would be a combination of pain-staking Flame work headed up by Giles Cheetham and advanced crowd creation work made in 3D by a team led by Rick Walia and Eric Deltour.

After the live action shoot in Los Angeles the complex post production began. A motion capture session was carried out using the excellent AudioMotion facilities. This featured girls of different body shapes walking, running, wading and climbing. Their movements were digitally recorded to give the CG models natural movement and flow. Using the Oscar winning software Massive, armies of girls were created to stream across the various types of terrain. The software, made for The Lord of the Rings trilogy, allowed the artificial girls to have their own ‘brains’ meaning they could react to each other and alter their behaviour accordingly. These intelligent Massive girls were then set free to interact with the live action girls and the composited flame girls.

The final shot posed a particular challenge and was an impressive effect to achieve. The task was tackled by taking the original plate and matching in a matte painting eight times the size of the shot – creating an artificial horizon. The 3D geometry was added and then the plate was populated with over 100,000 CG girls.

The commercial was great fun to work on but threw up a number of challenges along the way. Tracking over water is difficult at the best of times and tracking swimmers over water from a moving helicopter was particularly tricky. As well as using their talented team, The Mill received some additional consultancy from software manufacturer, Boujou for a joint effort in achieving the result. The shot was finally defeated by a combination of hand tracking and some expert Boujou knowledge.

The Mill, London
40-41 Great Marlborough Street
Soho, London W1F 7JQ
+44 20 7287 4041
info@the-mill.com

The Mill, New York
451 Broadway 5th floor
New York NY 10013
+1 212 337 3210
info@the-mill.com

[TimeKoder13]

Awesome, yummi fantasy...gotta get me some of that...

[Yossarian!]

A friend commented that he was waiting for the punchline. Great technical job but god Lynx has seen better scripts.

[killsky]

hoho,Nice