The deadline was tight, but the special effects team at California's The Orphanage came through with an intriguingly dark spot for PlayStation 2's "Consequences" that transforms fantasy into reality.

For the spot, TBWA\Chiat\Day "came to us with an amazing creative idea, but we weren't necessarily sure that we could do it justice," explains Stu Maschwitz, chief technology officer/senior VFX supervisor.

"We convinced the agency we could do it on a short schedule, even though there were a lot of crazy factors to consider. It was daunting, but the agency understood the limited time frame and amazing complexity of what we had to pull off."

"Consequences" features synthesized time-lapse special effects played backwards. The finale is played out at the beginning of the spot, as the branch of a huge tree smashes down on a house after being hit by lightning. We're then taken back in time to the initial birth of the tree after a prospector has spit out a seed from his mouth - all to demonstrate that every action has a consequence.

The Orphanage commenced with a live shoot but performed most of the work in post. "We shot our prospector on a traditional live shoot. Everything else was generated in miniature," says Maschwitz.

They created a system to shape 300 different scene changes, all photo-realistic. "Each scene had to change radically from one frame to the next, each slightly different from the other," explains Maschwitz. X-Frog (from Greenworks, Germany) created the tree's reverse growth while Adobe's After Effects composited various elements. Water Damage from DV Garage "splattered" CG textures throughout, while Discreet's Mental Ray rendered and "allowed us to do image-based lighting for the vehicles."

The 3D was done with Alias|Wavefront's Maya, whose new fluid dynamic capabilities were used for the sky.

The end-result "causes a Pavlovian response in the viewer," says Maschwitz. "That's what gets people's attention these days. By presenting them with a subtle picture up-front, it forces them to lean in and investigate. That's what the agency was looking for."