Ruben Vandebroek

Some of the most polished and meticulously realized VFX work submitted to this year’s First Boards Awards comes from Ruben Vandebroek, a 27-year-old CG artist at The Mill’s New York office who has clocked time on some high-profile commercial work after only two years as a full-up artist.

Vandebroek grew up in Heusden-Zolder, a town in the Flemish part of Belgium located near the Dutch border and studied computer science at a college near Brussels. After graduation, he spent some time working in digital content management, programming and designing online stores, news feeds and Flash media server applications.

“Back then what I always liked to do was a combination of design with programming and using scripting or programming techniques to make the design better,” he says. “And that’s what I do at The Mill often too: create scripts or find easier ways of getting the job done.”

As his projects increasingly incorporated 3D elements, he became intrigued by the medium and decided to do a Masters of Science and Digital Imaging & Design at New York University. He graduated in 2008 and landed a job as a CG artist at The Mill that same year. Though he’s dabbled in photography and poster design in the past, his work at The Mill takes up most of his time. “I love what I’m doing now, so I would like to continue getting better,” he says.

Over the past two years, he’s worked on ads for Barclaycard, Acura and Dell. One of his first jobs was Acura “Bullet”, the footage of which came into post-production under exposed. The ad opens with a bullet smashing through a glass bottle and transforming into a car. It required a lot of tracking and some Smoke work to create a fluid interaction between the car and the broken bottle.

His favorite job to date is “Rollercoaster”, the sequel to BBH, London and British banking brand Barclaycard’s wildly popular “Waterslide” ad. In the spot, directed by MJZ’s Nicolai Fuglsig, a man boards a vintage-style rollercoaster and commutes around London to the tune of Boston’s hit song “More Than a Feeling”.

The crew built a slightly worn out-looking rollercoaster in a studio for two shots, which the CG team modeled the VFX after. Once the edit was locked, The Mill had six weeks to turn around the post.
“I was involved from the beginning to end of the whole pipeline, going from a previz animation to generating the files that the motion control guys imported,” he says. “That whole pipeline was technically pretty challenging but it all worked out in the end.”

For the Dell spot “Treats”, Vandebroek was part of the team that helped transform a Prague soundstage into a whimsical Charlie and the Chocolate Factory-type world where elephant feet stomp gooey candy-colored blobs into shimmering laptops.

Vandebroek has an ongoing fascination with the most realistic types of CG and cites David Fincher’s film The Curious Case of Benjamin Button as the type of project he’d eventually like to work on. “You’re starting from an empty grid and in the end it’s hard to tell what is real and what is not,” he says.

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