Nike "Shoxploitation"

New York's PSYOP are about as close as you can get to a sure thing in the animation world, but even by their own lofty standards, they've outdone themselves with a series of short films for the Nike Shox Neo.

Titled "Shoxploitation", the online films take their cues from Blaxploitation films, as well as animé and street art, visually and in aggressive tone. Merging a matte, 2D background of muted grays, blues and purples with 3D animation, the four spots (five if you include the Ludacris-narrated trailer) cast athletes Brian Urlacher, Rasheed Wallace, Gary Sheffield and Clinton Portis as street action heroes.

The palette - and relentless action - is what ties the films together. "We wanted them to visually relate, but not in plot," says co-director Todd Mueller. "We tried to create something moody, so we chose colors based on creating a dark and mysterious feel, with a little splash of orange to create an unexpected palette," says co-director Kylie Matulick.

Action was also integral to the project, which was written, directed, designed and animated by the PSYOP team. "We made them as violent as we could," says Mueller noting that, while much more graphic than TV would allow, the violence has a cartoonish quality to it. "They're anti-heroes."

PSYOP worked with comic book illustrator Brian Wood to create the 2D environment before adding painterly texture to the films, while characters were created in 3D with motion capture. The entire project was completed in just four weeks - a far cry from the eight weeks usually afforded to a :30 commercial, which, unsurprisingly was the team's biggest hurdle. - Rae Ann Fera

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Audi "Letters"

BBH London's striking new spot "Letters" for the Audi A6 is not as much an explosion of sheet metal as it is an orchestrated chaos of car bits moving seemingly randomly towards the same destination. Directed by collective Pleix through Blink with animation by Moving Picture Company, the spot is based on Sometimes, a 2003 short created by Pleix where a building spontaneously blows apart and reassembles elsewhere.

Similarly here, a lone Audi perched atop a rooftop parking lot suddenly bursts apart into hundreds of 3D abstract parts that find their way back together. Along the way, the blocks bounce to momentarily reveal their contorted forms as letters that form the Audi tag "Vorsprung, Durch, Technik" (Advantage through technology).

Pleix delivered a detailed animatic to MPC that charted the slow, calculated movements of the car blocks. MPC then created a CG city landscape in inferno based on over 2,500 digital stills from Pleix. A 3D car was created in Maya because, as MPC 3D artist Mark Gregory says, they had to make the animated car look "even better than the real car".

This was one of the main challenges, he says. To make the car look better than the original they made crisper reflections, but make them too crisp and "it'll look like a CG image."

To deconstruct the car the 3D image was carved up into blocks that travel effortlessly through the air before rebuilding. A daunting task, but Gregory reveals, "We faked it. We just pulled a chunk [from the back of the 3D car] and made it look like it was all coming back together."

In reality, there was little room for trickery as the two-month project was created for HD. "You can get away with a lot less because you can see a lot more detail." - RF

Honda "Together"

Car ads that highlight product features are rarely engaging. Not so for a three-spot campaign for Honda's new FR-V.

In order to show that this family vehicle has seating for three in both the front and back, Wieden + Kennedy, London employed geometric shapes to charming effect. Created by David Daniels at London's Tandem Films, overlapping circles of bold, primary colors represent a man and woman who fall in love, have a baby and inherit a yippy rectangular dog Syd - and how they all fit comfortably together in their new ride.

The idea of using circles came from creatives Matt Gooden and Ben Walker. To help sell the idea to Honda, Daniels created a scrapbook of circles, showing the myriad ways they could communicate emotion. Crazy as it sounds, the story of Tom, Marcia, Lola and Syd is effectively told in this minimalist environment. And design flourishes - such as the psychedelia of circles when the two are courting - add life to the shapes while still remaining simple.

Simplicity, says Daniels, was the most difficult aspect of the project. "We tried to make it quite minimal. We ended up taking a fair amount of stuff out."

"Together", "Fun Fair" and "Drive Thru" were created entirely in After Effects, though Daniels drew elements such as Syd for more realistic movement. Sound effects also helped create personality and lend a sense of reality to the action. - RF

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Fun Fair

Hummer "Evolution", "Lifestyle/Nature", "Accessorize"

Stockholm animation shop Filmtecknarna's reputation for kaleidoscopic rendering came home to roost big time when Modernista! Boston handed it the challenge of a trio of spots for Hummer. Briefed to produce "something different" in their trademark style, directors Boris Nawratil and David Nord embarked on a hectic deconstruction/replication/reconstruction cycle, breaking down a Hummer into recognizable parts and reassembling it in fantastical animated floral collages.

Hummer's tough image was subverted by its unexpected fragmentation into parts that the animators could "have fun" with. Nawratil says modeling the car was the most elaborate task; the rendering was intense, with timescales to match. "Our main concern was being sure we could handle the rendering and break the truck into enough pieces."

Each spot - "Evolutions", "Lifestyle/Nature" and "Accessorize" - took around two months from concept to completion. Much of the modeling was done in Electric Image Modeler and SoftImage 3D. The shapes were animated in After Effects.

Surprises were the order of the day - Modernista!'s reputation for selecting and buying the best music kept them alert. "It was tough because we wanted to the image to be in tune with the music." And "Accessorize" required modeling a new set of parts.

Always seeking something new, with the client's blessing Nawratil and Nord set themselves challenges. "Lifestyle/Nature" takes the seasons as its theme. "We'd seen a lot of that so we thought it would be funny to minimalize it to the point at which it becomes abstract." - Piers Ford

View the spots:Evolution
Lifestyle/Nature
Accessorize

Xbox "Portal"

Considering their initial brief was to produce some "scratchy animation", Nexus directors Smith & Foulkes came up with a damn slick spot for McCann Erickson's client, Xbox. Tight schedules left no room for surprises. Armed with a tag that commands the audience to "Save Yourself" from day-to-day dreariness, they came up with a deceptively simple comic book 20-second sequence of scenes featuring people in mundane situations - fishing, at the gas station, in the diner, at the laundromat - being sucked through a swirling vortex towards the wonderful new world of Xbox.

The pair recall two major challenges: generating a possibility-rich atmosphere in scenes lasting just five seconds; and avoiding any suggestion of a sinister experience. "We tried to keep it pure, black and white and comic book in style," says Smith. The drawings were animated in After Effects with a "tiny bit of 3D" in the final, swirling vortex. The only hint of color is the green Xbox light that accompanies the figures as they are sucked into a new dimension. Whizz-bang cries of surprise courtesy of the directors themselves added to the vital sense of fun: the client stipulated that the transition was an enjoyable experience.

Despite reservations about not having time to generate atmosphere for each scene, the sense of expectation is there in plenty. "The client took a bit of convincing about fishing," says Smith. "They thought it wasn't so much mundane as totally uncool. But when they saw what we'd done with the weather to increase the atmosphere, they liked it." - PF

Ford Fiesta "Ice Puck"

The preparation for Ford Fiesta "Ice Puck" turned a group of likeable animators into a team of hardcore academics. Created by London's Realise Studios for Ogilvy & Mather, the spot, directed by Daniel Barber of Rose Hackney Barber, puts a car at the center of a vicious, chaotic ice hockey game. The challenge lead technical director Paul Simpson had was how to make the hatchback-cum-puck handle itself as realistically as possible, "not just at the mercy of the players, but with its own intelligence and never completely out of control."

Car animation is "tricky", period, says Simpson, and 3D adds to the challenge. It demands relentless attention to detail, from the weight of the vehicle to the reflection of light off the paintwork. The team did a "ton" of research and wrote custom shaders for the renderer to mimic how real car paint absorbs and transmits light.

Ford supplied a CADCAM model, which Realise modified for use with its in-house software program. Stunt footage was studied and used to create test animations, providing a series of moves that would later be used in the spot. The result was the creation of a "substantial" bit of custom code, says Simpson, which enabled the car to behave in a believable way. And a combination of adequate time and Barber's "open approach" paid dividends and kept surprises to a minimum.

"The technical side is tough, but the animation was fun," he says. "Our animators understand the importance of getting the car to move realistically, but they also rose to the challenge of playing around with it so that there's a sense of it guiding its own destiny." - PF

Infiniti "Snowflakes"

Created to entice people to buy their loved ones a fancy car for Christmas, it's perhaps no surprise that "Snowflakes", except for the cars themselves, is all CG fantasy world. "[TBWA\Chiat\Day, LA] asked us to create a dreamy winter landscape seamlessly incorporating fantastic elements and driving footage," says if/Then director Brent Bonacorso of LA's Notorious Pictures. "As the project developed, the aesthetic evolved - moving from a somewhat realist perspective to a more Asian-influenced, painterly feel." The result? A kind of soft world more akin to analogue than the hard zeros and ones of the digital realm.

After shooting the cars inside a large white plastic bubble to simulate the diffused lighting conditions of a snowstorm, Bonacorso had to get inventive with the computers to achieve the balance between fantasy and reality. "We developed new techniques, mainly combining existing principles to tackle a problem in a unique way," he says, noting that adhering to the "proper way" of overcoming obstacles in the effects studio usually leads to an "off-the-shelf" look - which nobody wanted. "We came up with some odd solution that contributed to the unique feel of the spot: CG trees that weren't CG at all, a snow system based on the behavior of particles in water, and I feel like this unconventional approach really nailed it."

As the cars cruise through the falling snow, passing an art deco train billowing steam, they eventually arrive at a ski chalet followed by a pull back revealing that the whole scene took place in a store front window. "Creating an aesthetic beyond what the client expected was quite fun," says Bonacorso. - Jonathan Link

View the spots:Snowflakes G35<
Snowflakes Fx45

Pete Miser "Scent of a Robot"

A song about a robot that thinks he's human but accidentally finds out he's not is an excellent jumping point to go nuts in an animation studio. Which is pretty much what happened to UVPhactory senior producer Brian Welsh who devised a concept of a robot's struggle between dual realities.

The story is told through alternating POVs, which shift from what the robot sees - a normal looking world of humans - to an omniscient view showing use the real scene: robots carrying on as office slaves not knowing they are robots. The look of each POV is distinct and reflects the separate realities. Of course, if anyone misses the point, there's Pete Miser - allegedly a rising star in the hip-hop world - repeating over and over again that "I'm a robot programmed not to know that I'm a robot..."

Welsh notes that the gig would have been impossible without Softimage XSI and two third-party plugins: the Dirt Map shader created by Daniel Rind and XSI camera export by Mind Think Tools. "Dirt Map allowed us to quickly create soft and subtle shading without using render intensive methods, and with XSI we could work with 3D elements in a 2D compositing environment."

Which served the goal well. "We didn't want super glossy robots. We wanted to keep the environment slightly fun and playful which, is really in keeping with the song," says Welsh, crediting a huge team for different and challenging aspects of the work. "In so many ways this job played to all of our individual strengths. By far the hardest part was living up to the expectations we all put on ourselves." - JL

View the video: Scent of a Robot

Citroën "Transform"

Forget plastic, the one word of advice these days for animation is motion capture. Okay, it's two words, but if you use the shorter "mocap", it's one. Regardless, the process of making normally inanimate objects come alive with human movement by putting a real person in a suit full of sensors is pretty amazing. "Transform", Citroën's new spot, uses the technique with startlingly impressive results. It also makes the car company's new tagline "alive with technology" all the more appropriate.

"If the goal is pure realism, it doesn't matter how good an animator is," says director and CG artist Neill Blomkamp of Vancouver VFX shop The Embassy and Toronto's Spy Films on the wonders of natural movement through mocap. "If you are doing a walking robot, you would hand animate, but we wanted a performance." And, with this clever ad, they got one.

To get the effect of a car transforming into a dancing robot, Blomkamp tracked and digitized Justin Timberlake's choreographer boogie-ing away and then translated those moves for the computer generated robot. "The biggest challenge was getting the motion data to carry over into an inorganic object - without the flexibility of organic joints," says Blomkamp. "We had to be sure that one part [of the car] didn't crash into other parts of the car during the dance." Which, to some degree, limited the movement of the original dance.

Despite this, the spot has pushed the outside of the envelope in terms of the technology. If you thought the Mini robot was neato, think again. "I think motion capture probably will become more common," says Blomkamp. "CG characters are going to become more abundant." And more real. - JL

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