Thursday, 15 May 2014

Conference: MPC Advertising, Anthony Bloor & Carsten Keller

When Animals Play Humans

This talk was mainly about how the company approached giving human like characteristics to animals, they talked about how the character had to come across in the advert and the challenges they faced.


Dancing Pony directed by Douglas Wilson
http://www.moving-picture.com/work/three-the-pony



The director, Dougal Wilson was very certain with how he wanted the outcome to be and was also very involved.
They had to look at Michael Jackson moonwalking and backsliding dance videos for reference, which were then tested out with the 3D model.
Douglas Wilson had made many videos of how he wanted the pony to dance, move and act, he filmed himself doing many of these actions he wanted implemented, which the animators then tried to test with the model.
The animators struggled adding human characteristics to the pony as this proved to be the most difficult, there were at least 95 fur simulations in a shot for the movement of the pony. There were many tests to see how the hair moved, the body fur and the head.
They showed us the many changes that had to be made to the storyboard and animation, so I learnt that the animators had to keep testing to get the right type of shot.
There were scenes not implemented in the first storyboard that were added by the end, so the project kept continously evolving.




The directors that worked on this project was Dom & Nic, they contacted MPC and discussed wanting to create a talking platypus and beat-boxing bird.
The challenge was that platypuses are quite rare so finding references was hard and most were from books, which did not really help to inform them about the way a platypus moves.
They quickly sculpted out the body to get an idea of the scale before then making a standard T pose model.
They used a stuffed otter as a reference when filming because otters are similar sizes to the platypuses.
They wanted the characteristics of the platypus to be laid back and slow so this meant trying to animate it to get that personality trait across.
They worked during the editing process in colour because then when converted to black and white it would not lose quality and simplified the lighting processes.
The beat-boxing bird was only visible on screen for four seconds in the final video so they had to find a way to make those four seconds count.
Their video reference was looking at how small birds in particular act and move their head. Their first test shot was to add a beatboxing sound over a video of a bird.


The commercial was directed by Traktor.
The company's work on The Pony was well received so they got more requests for that type of work.They tackled animating a pony but now they faced animating a cat for this commercial.
The cat used in the video was called Bronte, who was actually a kitten given as a reference. Reference videos of cats yawning was used to create the illusion of the kitty singing.
The kitten was modelled and rigged, then the environment was re-created digitally so that when Bronte was placed in the composition shot, the lighting and composition matched the filming.
A problem faced during the filming was lighting, it was raining and there was no sunshine so many extra additional lights were added to create the illusion of the sun.

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