Conference: Glassworks Commercials

High-End VFX: Glassworks, Rudiger Kaltenhauser and Markus Lauterbach

http://www.fmx.de/program2014/event/3566

Rudiger Kaltenhauser, went to work for Glassworks in London, 2005 after his studies at Filmakademie Baden-Wuerttemberg.

Freeview: CatandBudgie

For the pre-production, they had to decide what shots were important and what could be thrown away. In a commercial industry there isn't as much time given when working on feature films, the team size can change drastically which could always affect the work speed of the project and production result.

The cat's head had to be modelled in Zbrush because it was the most part of the body that required certain movements and the eyes had to be changed, so more expression could be conveyed in the video.

The bird was then re-modelled from the real-life model so it could be placed back into the footage and blended in, this was because it was harder to control the bird than the cat.

G-Star

Glassworks, Amsterdam were approached to produce a video about the process of denim production for clothing company G-Star. The commercial is titled 'The Art Of Raw'.

Different sequences seen in the final video went through experimentation because they had to keep getting feedback from G-Star.

The music for the commercial fits perfectly with the shoot. The 'dog' in the video shall become the future mascot for G-Star as they will use it in future campaigns. The model was 3D scanned then cleaned up to create a high resolution version.

Adidas: Climachill

The Ice Crown

After the G Star brief, Glassworks received more work that wanted more focus on macro shots and close ups.

However, this brief was focused on an ice theme which meant they had to look at completely different references to create the shots Adidas required.

To create the aluminium dots, they looked at many reference images of frost on different objects. 

To create the ice crowns, very geometric shapes were modelled to make the crystals. Then adding some particles after the aluminium dots land.

Then a frost field grows, which was created using a particle emitter. The lighting used for the ice crown was environment lighting and a fill light.

The material David Beckham wears had to be modelled and the actual cloth is made up of two types of yarn. The modeller had to research these two types of yarn because if looked at closely, the knots inter-wine differently so to match the real cloth, reference photos were needed. After understanding the two types of yarn that make up the cloth,  different tests were then carried out to understand the twist of the yarn.

I chose to go to this talk because I am interested in VFX and thought it would be interesting to find out the type of briefs that are given and how VFX is implemented into commercials. It was also an insight to realise that their work time frame is considerable short than when making big budget films, some companies had only 2 months or a month to complete a brief ready for the company to release the campaign ad.
This meant that they had to work through the pre-production stage very fast and move on to experimentation so when it comes to post-production they have time to change things if the company wants any.