Friday 18 Apr 2008 - 11:47
Visual effects and animation studio Method has made the whole world sing – everyone from weightless spacemen to Maori warriors – for a new campaign for the Discovery Channel. Collaborating with Director James Rouse, Outsider, and brand strategy, advertising and design company 72andSunny, Method created a seamless 60-second anthem spot entitled I Love the World that breaks April 15th and three 30-second bumpers that premiere this summer.
"It was a collaborative effort," says Lisa Houck, Executive Producer for Method. "We had to cull through tons and tons of stock to find the most outrageous footage from their most popular shows. In fact, we were on the job several months before they went and shot all the plates to put into the scenes."
That was Method’s major challenge: once the scenes themselves were selected, they had to shoot green-screen footage of specific actors, hosts, or celebrities to insert into the scenes in a seamless and convincing way. No single cut lasted more than a few seconds, and all the action had to 'sing along' to the bouncy yet contemplative Boom DeAh Dah theme song. The actors themselves were shot in a studio in South Africa in front of a green screen; the astronaut sequences were the most elaborate, shot on stage in full rigs.
"This is what we do best," said Alex Kolasinski, lead 2D VFX artist at Method. "Making beautiful, clean pictures out of separate elements, developing a unified look and point of view. And this time, the stock footage came from all sorts of random places; we didn’t get it in one kind of format. Some were HD, some was DigiBeta, some was film. Our artists gave it a single and unified look."
The key spot, Discovery Channel’s I Love the World, begins in orbital space, with two space-suited astronauts looking down on a beautiful blue Earth. They are so moved by the experience they start to sing. It’s a slightly silly little ditty about the remarkable planet itself – its beautiful bridges, its singing whales – and a moment later, the scene jumps to a wilderness photographer in the middle of nowhere, humming the same song. Then it jumps again, to African natives in the middle of a tribal dance who are also singing the same song. Even Buddhist monks on parade get into the act. The overall effect is slightly dizzying and certainly awe-inspiring – a perfect reflection of Discovery’s new slogan, I Love the World.
It was a challenging project from beginning to end. "Every element has to integrate into the stock shot," said Chris Smallfield 3D VFX Artist, Method. "You have to make sure that the lighting is correct, that the angle of the camera is the same as in the stock shot. There was a big amount of pre-production work to make sure those plates are going to match."
Sometimes the work required some very creative reverse-engineering. "We had to look at the stock footage and basically track the shot," Smallfield said. "We had to figure out the lens used, where the main action will be, what the distance away from the camera had been. We had to do mock-ups of how the sets should be even before we shot it."
“James [Rouse, the director] wanted to make it very difficult for us,” joked Kolasinki. "He didn’t choose particularly easy shots to work with. Like the lava shot: there were lots of elements, like flowing water and heat waves, already in that shot, and we had to match them when shooting our actor in his heat suit for the final composite. We photographed everything over a green screen, locked off with a locked camera, and then tracked the stock footage."
In fact, the very brief 'lava shot' – a long shot of a researcher in a heat suit, surrounded by flowing and exploding molten rock, throwing his hands ecstatically into the air as he sings, “I love the magma!” -- is indicative of the hidden complexities Method had to face on this project. "They wanted us to have this lava explosion behind the guy," Chris said. "And we tried as far as we could to find stock footage to match that, but everything we found was either framed wrong, or the angle was wrong, or the lens was wrong. So we ended up doing some CG lava and mixing in some photo elements as well. There were a lot of things like that – where we couldn’t find stock footage that really fit, so we had to make it from scratch."
The software used included Maya, Mental Ray, Flame, and Shake.
The spot can be seen here.
Digital Arts Staff
For more information see the Method Studios Web site.
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