Revisiting Huck
Mark Twain classic gets gritty
Somewhere between its controversial reception and the amount of retellings, Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn - although dealing with slavery in the Southern US - became "the literary equivalent of a Saturday morning cartoon," says Radium designer/director Brady Baltezore. Thus, in his animated piece "Huck Finn" for Barnes & Noble's Moving Paragraphs series through Team Detroit, Baltezore evoked the book's grittier origins.

Baltezore's clip, depicting a passage from the book read by novelist Richard Russo, blends dark tones with life-like images. Work by Kara Walker, a contemporary artist who utilizes silhouettes, was an inspiration, says Baltezore, who worked primarily in Maya for the CG piece. "Her work is evocative, with an element of social commentary on race in the South."

Baltezore referenced elements that he felt would reflect the era, like block printing and old-wooden type. He also provided the POV of a CG fish, below the surface of the river.

"I wanted to tell the story through the river's perspective," he explains. "[Huck and Jim] make this journey along the river, but the river is the journey - it bears witness to them the entire time."

Wide world of sport
Glassworks pulls out the stops for Pepsi football spot
When one isn't troubled by budgetary or logistical concerns, it doesn't seem ludicrous to suggest getting Ronaldinho, David Beckham, Thierry Henry and Frank Lampard (among others) together for a spot. And sticking them on asteroids replete with football pitches and speeding taxicabs, or exotic locales like desert islands and rainforests, isn't that big a stretch either. But for London's Glassworks team, creating the fantastic scenes in Pepsi "Open Source" through CLM BBDO, Boulogne-Billancourt - in which average Joes dream up scenarios starring top footballers that would comprise the "perfect Pepsi ad" - required some fancy footwork.

Compositors worked hard to match lighting conditions between location shots and greenscreen footage of the sports celebs. While the team thought the asteroid shots should be lit by a single source, director Tarsem opted to stick with the stronger lighting used in the greenscreen shoot.

The other major challenge was creating environments that would morph seamlessly into each other. "The thing we were fighting against for the whole job was the machine-gun edit," says 3D supervisor Daniel Jahnel.

Using Softimage XSI for the 3D, Boujou and Matchmover for tracking and Flame for compositing, the team worked for nine weeks to deliver the spot, only to be told that new players had to be subbed in for others already there. "That created a few weeks of work," says producer Phil Linturn.

Glassworks http://www.glassworks.co.uk

Fine lines
a52 spins a winner for Nike
For anyone who's seen the footage of drugged spiders haplessly weaving webs, a52 director Andy Hall's "Spider" for Nike - in which time-lapse footage shows a spider spinning a web in the shape of a sneaker - might seem the result of a fortuitous Ritalin-induced high.

"There's a whole series of spots that we've created for Nike's Flywire technology, reflecting different elements of what this new technology represents," explains Hall of the Wieden+Kennedy, Tokyo spot. "In the case of 'Spider', [it was about] emphasizing something that was incredibly light but incredibly strong."

Shot in his garden over three days, Hall used a Canon 1D digital stills camera, shooting 12 frames per second, to create the environments and give the film an '80s nature show aesthetic. "It's like you're seeing this thing evolve over the period of a day. [The shoe] is almost accidental, a moment, a trick of the light," he explains.

Working in Maya and rendering in Mental Ray, real time-lapse on the web's building sequences proved to have too much movement, so Hall and his team of three built them up over the five-week production process. Hall worked with colleague Max Ulichney to design the CG spider based on the shoe's colors, creating the spider's movements from documentary footage.

The believability of the web was the most difficult thing to nail, taking the duration of the five weeks. "We were constantly revisiting it to get enough information for the shoe to look like a shoe, but not cluttered or messy," says Hall.

a52 http://www.a52.com
W+K Tokyo http://www.wktokyo.jp

Paper vision
Psyop acts spontaneously for Converse
Directing a music video without a finished song, lyrics or even an artist might seem an unlikely situation, but one that Psyop directors Marie Hyon and Marco Spier faced when they agreed to work on a project for Converse's centenary campaign, Connectivity. To mark the brand's 100th year, New York-based agency Anomaly asked hip-hop producer Pharrell Williams to produce a musical collaboration between his band N.E.R.D., The Strokes' frontman Julian Casablancas and Santogold.

But before all three artists were even finalized, Anomaly had a three-month turnaround to deliver a hybrid music video/commercial. That meant the directors - who didn't hear the track "My Drive-Thru" until the first day of production - would have to adopt a work ethic more in line with music-making than advertising. "Usually we're quite meticulous about how we see the story play out," says Hyon. "We go to the set completely prepared - we pre-visualize everything and plan out everything shot by shot. So this time we thought we should have a fairly punk rock attitude and just see what happens."

The video tied into the Connectivity print campaign, which portrays various musicians and cultural icons as black-and-white paper dolls. With the crumpled paper aesthetic as a starting point, Hyon and Spiers began by creating a mock-up paper doll diorama in their office and shooting it with a macro lens. That test eventually formed the basis of the "white playground" set - boxes, treadmills, kick bags, stairs and Plexiglas - they created in a studio for the artists to interact with.