Object-Tracked Commercial Writeup

James Cunningham of Digipost writes:

"It was a really fun job. I built a set of light plastic helmets with LEDs in them - around 14 in each, soldered them all together, velcro-ed on a 9 volt battery and even had a dimmer resistor. They showed up really well on film for us to track. Then I built simple polygons for each helmet, a vertex per LED. We'd just track the LEDs and then object track to the obj mesh. 

We got really fast. Maybe 3 shots a day. But a hard shot like three characters at the table, I did a full scene track as the Director Of Photography was zooming on everything, then did object tracks within that. That took a full day. 

We used to use boujou but no way we could do this in boujou. The software does take a little getting used to and we both found the navigating in the 3d view kinda tricky [Ed.: this was before maya mode] but you saved our skin. Once we got the good tracks to the actor's head movements we had 50% of the animation done for us already.

SynthEyes played an incredibly pivotal role and worked really well for us. Thanks for making such good software. "

The Commercial:

Also see the CG Society discussion and stills. 

Cascade - full commercial at Youtube

"Making Of" Clips:

The Chimp     The Tasmanian Tiger     The Fox     The Rottweiler

Credits from CG Society:

The VFX was done in New Zealand at Digipost. Took a team of 4-6 artists 18 weeks, from character design, supervising the shoot, high res print stills and then working through 52 shots in a 60 second commercial. Directed by Jesse Warn of Film Construction and DOP by the legendary John Seale (Oscar winner for The English Patient, plus noms for Rain man and Witness). The agency was Badjar.

Modeled with Maya and Zbrush. 
Camera and object tracking - SynthEyes 
Animation - Maya 
Rendering - Mental Ray and Renderman for Maya 
Compositing - Shake and Flame

VFX Supervisor - James Cunningham 
3d Artists : Nick Wilson, Matt Sutherland, Jay Renner, Leslie Chan, Glen Dawick, Kei Kasai. 
2d Artists : Stu Bedford, Matt Westbrook, Katy Wakefield 
BG masks by Glasshammer.