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The Trailblazer Studios family of companies — Red Truck Films, Serious Robots, and Blazing Music + Sound — demonstrated the art and Xyience of making effective commercials with a pair of 30-second spots, shot and posted in HD, for the dietary supplement’s Breakfast Bars. The commercials, featuring UFC (Ultimate Fighting Championship) middleweight champ Rich Franklin and UFC welterweight champ Matt Hughes, are airing on MTV and SPIKE. Xyience is a major sponsor of UFC Pay Per View events.

Red Truck Films shot the two commercials in HD for PositiveImage Video, which produced the package for Xyience. Red Truck brought in Rob Cohen to direct the Wilmington, North Carolina-based shoot, which Red Truck DP Garye Costner lensed with a Sony Cine Alta HD camera.

“It’s hard to get people from the West Coast to consider shooting in North Carolina, but we convinced PositiveImage executive producer Anthony Giordano to take a leap of faith with us,” says executive producer Jeff Lanter. “Once we get people here, we have them. When we can get somebody through the door from outside the region, we’ve been able to keep them as customers.”

DP Costner believes the two-day 24p HD shoot at numerous locations gave “a unique look” to the pair of commercials.

In the fast-paced “Xyience 101” Rich Franklin plays a high-school science teacher who asks his students, “What is Xyience?” To illustrate the benefits of the breakfast bars he puts his students through a series of physical tests — running on a treadmill, lifting weights. Those sampling the tasty Xyience product outperform their classmates who ate ‘other’ brands. The spot concludes with a student asking Franklin if he eats Xyience Breakfast Bars followed by quick cuts to Franklin in the ring and a Xyience vending machine in the school corridor with Franklin’s image on it.

In “Simple Life,” Matt Hughes laments that with all the demands that come with being champ he doesn’t even have time for a country breakfast anymore. Xyience Breakfast Bars are a perfect breakfast replacement for Hughes who is shown juggling chores on his farm with training and making red carpet promotional appearances.

Serious Robots pushed to edit the spots in their native HD resolution to gain flexibility in compositing and color-correction “The spots were shot really well, which gave me a lot of latitude in post,” notes Scott Roy who cut the commercials. “For ‘Xyience 101’ we simulated a very edgy bleach bypass look in Avid DS Nitris, while we gave ‘Simple Life’ a warmer look with sepia tones on some of the farm shots showing Matt throwing hay into a truck and carrying tires for the tractor.”

Roy onlined the spots and output them in SD letterbox; HD masters serve to futureproof the commercials. At another Trailblazer company, Blazing Music + Sound, Aaron Keane composed the spots’ dynamic original tracks, and Keane and Willie Elias performed the sound design and mix.

PositiveImage’s Giordano found that “we got more value for our dollar in North Carolina than in LA. We would have had to change the creative to make them affordable if we stayed in Los Angeles. By working with Red Truck, we were able to produce the commercials we wanted at the price we needed.

“All of the Trailblazer facilities offered everything we required and more,” Giordano continues. “Everyone was great, really top level. They did a terrific job on the spots. Xyience and UFC were very happy. We may do more spots, and if we do I’ll certainly go back to the Trailblazer Studios companies.”

Credits
Agency: PositiveImage Video Inc.
Director: Rob Cohen
Executive Producer: Anthony Giordano
Producer: Bob Nastasi

Production Co.: Red Truck Films/Raleigh
DP: Garye Costner
Executive Producer: Jeff Lanter
Producer: Graham Redmond

Editorial: Serious Robots/Raleigh
Editor: Scott Roy

Music & Mix: Blazing Music + Sound/Raleigh
Composer: Aaron Keane
Sound Design/Mix: Aaron Keane, Willie Elias

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A man lies comfortably on a spa table, his body wrapped in plastic; his right eye is covered by a slice of lemon, his left by a slice of lime. An attendant starts a slow drip of refreshing Sprite into his open mouth, but carelessly jostles the apparatus as she leaves. As the tasty soft drink drips onto his forehead, the spa patron manages to shake off the lime slice, revealing a second, smaller mouth in place of his left eye. That vaguely unsettling scenario is Spa TV, just one spot in ‘Sublymonal Advertising’, a quirky new campaign for Sprite created by ad agency Crispin Porter & Bogusky and Framestore NY and directed by Happy.

“We initially signed on for one HD cinema spot and three 30-second television spots,” explains James Razzall, Senior Producer at Framestore NY. “Everybody was having so much fun with these wild scenarios that we ended up doing two 60-second and one 30-second cinema spots, three 30-second television spots and a whole bunch of stuff for the web. It’s become a truly crazy interactive campaign in which people watching on DV-R or Tivo can go through the spots frame-by-frame and discover hidden scenes and codes for the website.”

“The ‘Sublymonal’ campaign involved very fast edits of seemingly unconnected images and striking scenarios reflecting the union of lemon and lime,” says Murray Butler, Framestore NY’s Senior VFX Supervisor on the campaign. “We had a extremely varied effects brief which included cleaning up sumo wrestlers, making animatronic flowers appear more believable, creating tiny nurses and putting a mouth where an eye should be. Suffice it to say, it’s been an amazing experience.

Amazing is right. Sumo TV opens with the incongruous vision of a green Sumo wrestler running through a dark forest. A disembodied electronic voice identifies him as ‘Lime’. From the other direction comes another Sumo wrestler, this time yellow. The same voice calls him ‘Lemon’. As the two race towards each other, the scene intermittently shifts to two Volkswagen Beetles – one green, one yellow – also racing towards one another against a sunny seaside backdrop. On a lonely tree stump between the rapidly converging wrestlers, a young man in a powder blue tuxedo suddenly and inexplicably appears, just in time to have his head sandwiched in between the ample bellies of the two wrestlers. The impact sets off a rush of lemon-lime (‘lymon’) imagery as the aforementioned cars merge into one another.

“The VW Beetles were my biggest challenge,” says Butler. “The 3D cars were created using Autodesk Maya and had to appear as if they were going to crash. Using Discreet Flame, I recreated the entire scene using projection maps, which allowed me control the camera movement together with the speed and position of the cars. I regraded the single lemon car to create a second lime car, then used a combination of morphing effects and sparks to create the ripple as they merge into one another.”

Still another spot, entitled Defibrillator, has a formally dressed young woman collapsing on to a flight of stone steps. Coming to her rescue is a miniature ambulance bearing a green and yellow cross on its side. Two tiny nurses emerge from the diminutive vehicle and attach electrodes to a large lemon and lime. Using defibrillator paddles, they apply electrified lymon to the young woman’s parched tongue. A rush of lemon-lime imagery revives and refreshes the young woman.

“We composited a blue screen sequence involving the girl and the nurses, again using Flame,” says Butler. “That effect involved matching the depth of field on the foreground plates to our plates of the helpful nurses. We also animated the girls tongue to wobble as they ‘revived’ it. Making this campaign work also meant assembling a lot of different elements created from HD 35mm footage, NTSC 8mm footage, 16mm shots, stock shots, tiff files and others. We also versioned HD cinema masters, television and web versions, all at different resolutions and aspect ratios. It was a big job.”

This spot is the latest in a series of collaborations between Framestore NY and Happy, starting with Wrigley’s ‘Dog’ and including work for Skittles, Wendys, Brawny, Full Throttle and Adidas.

About Framestore CFC
Framestore CFC is the largest visual effects and computer animation studio in Europe, with over 20 years of experience in digital film and video technology.

The company has won numerous international awards including two Technical Academy Awards from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, three BAFTA Craft Awards and eleven Primetime Emmy Awards.

The company’s movie portfolio includes work on such films as ‘Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban’, ‘Troy’, ‘Layer Cake’, ‘Thunderbirds’, ‘Enduring Love’, ‘Cold Mountain’, ‘Love Actually’, ‘Bright Young Things’ and ‘Underworld’.

Recent television work includes ‘Space Odyssey: Voyage to the Planets’, ‘Sea Monsters’, ‘The Giant Claw’ and ‘Land of Giants’ (Walking With Dinosaurs specials) and ‘Dinotopia’.

Among Framestore CFC’s notable commercial credits are Renault Espace ‘Hector’s Life’, Audi ‘Illusions’, Johnnie Walker ‘Tree’, the Post Office ‘Ant’ commercials, Johnnie Walker ‘Fish’, Levi’s ‘Odyssey’, Audi ‘Drink Like a Fish’, Xbox ‘Mosquito’ and Guinness ‘Surfer’.

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FilmCore New York helped to capture the intense emotions aroused by World Cup Soccer in providing editorial services for a new campaign for ESPN. Editors Jón Stefánsson and Doug Walker each cut two spots for the package, conceived by Wieden & Kennedy and featuring the music and voices of the seminal rock band U2.

he intent of the campaign is to get American viewers interested in World Cup Soccer by showing the effect the games have on sports fans in other countries. Anthem, cut by Stefánsson to City of Blinding Lights, presents a montage evoking the games’ ability to turn the world’s attention away from its woes. In his voice-over, Bono states, “Just a ball and a goal…that simple thing closes the schools, closes the shops, closes a city and stops a war.” The campaign theme is “One game changes everything.”

Each of the spots has strong emotional content. Ivory Coast, about that country’s first trip to the World Cup, begins ominously. An airport scene shows people milling about nervously as gun toting soldiers patrol the terminal. “The story begins very tensely,” said Stefánsson. “You get the feeling that something bad is about to happen, that perhaps warring factions are about to start a fight. But soon you realize that it’s not a fight, but rather a celebration—people are coming together to rally around their national team.”

U2’s music with its ringing guitars and sweeping vocals provided an interesting compliment to the visuals. “The agency had specific ideas about the tracks they wanted to use. Nevertheless, we tried many songs from the U2 catalog,” Stefánsson recalled. “Although I had to manipulate some songs more than others, in the end, their tone and feel worked well with the stories we were trying to tell.”

Stefánsson is currently editing a fifth and penultimate spot in the campaign. USA will focus on the U.S. World Cup team and feature the song Elevation. “I’m excited about it and hope it will be as wonderful as the rest of the campaign,” he said.

FilmCore Editorial Santa Monica is located at 1222 6th Street, Santa Monica, CA 90401. For more information, call (310) 587-2400.

FilmCore New York is located at 149 5th Avenue, 6th floor, New York, NY. For more information, call (212) 627-3100.

FilmCore Editorial San Francisco is located at 545 Sansome St., 7th Floor, San Francisco, CA 94111-2908. For more information, call (415) 392-6300.

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yU + co designed and produced main title graphics for The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift, Universal Pictures’ new action film which opened June 16th. The studio’s elegant 3D typography is woven seamlessly with live action and designed to evoke the spirit of the film by mimicking the “drift” driving technique employed by the cars in the story. yU + co also created the film’s end crawl.

The main title graphics appear over the first scene of the film, which follows the main character Sean Boswell (Lucas Black) as he arrives for a drift competition at a packed sports stadium. Graphic elements float through the frame from all angles and twist in slow, graceful arcs. Their motion is styled after “drift,” a specialized racing technique in which drivers over-steer their cars so that rear of the vehicle appears to chase the front end around turns.

“We faced an interesting design challenge inasmuch as the back-plate is very important to the film narrative,” said yU + co creative director Garson Yu. “Of course, the information communicated by the graphics is important too, so we had to find a way to make both elements coexist in harmony.

“The typography is integrated with the live action in a very organic way and it is paced to match the speed changes incorporated into the live action editorial, so rather than distract from, the graphics support the narrative.”

yU + co’s design team worked directly with Justin Lin, the film’s director, in placing and designing the motion of the individual type animations. “The idea behind drift driving is to maintain a balance between freedom and control,” said lead animator Etsuku Uji. “It is very dynamic. Our challenge was to capture that dynamism without being too assertive.”

For the end crawl, the designers came up with a very different twist on the drift theme. As credits scroll up the frame, silhouetted tire marks cut through the frame in swooshing curves. “Because this is an action film, the conventional choice would have been for very bold graphics, but this design runs completely counter to that,” said yU + co executive producer Claire O’Brien. “It’s subtle and that’s what makes it so powerful…it’s the power of understatement.”

Credits for yU + co go to Garson Yu, Creative Director; Claire O’Brien, Executive Producer; Ryan “Reno” Robertson, Producer; Yolanda Santosa, Art Director; Etsuko Uji, Designer/Lead Animater; James Hurlburt, Shawn Le and Johnny Wong, Animators; Zachary Scheuren Editor/Inferno Artist.

yU + co is located at 941 N. Mansfield Ave., Hollywood, CA 90038. For more information, call (323) 606-5050 or visit www.yuco.com.

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When you think of Lynx deodorant do you think of the macho smelling anti-perspirant or do you think of gorgeous, pouting, scantily clad ladies? Everyone knows Lynx is all about the ladies. Lots and lots of ladies.

Lynx campaigns have become legendary over the last few years with the brand picking up ten Cannes Lions amongst numerous other awards – the pressure on any new ad is tremendous.

The Mill have just finished the post production on the new Lynx commercial ‘Billions’ directed by Frederick Bond for BBH through MJZ. BBH wanted a commercial that would take the concept to the next level – one which would add a ‘wow’ factor never seen before and The Mill stepped up to the challenge.

The brief was deceptively simple: following on with the ‘Spray more. Get more’ campaign, it featured Brazilian, Thai and Swedish girls flocking to a beach where a man was wildly spraying himself with the new ‘Click’ deodorant. This sounded like an easy enough challenge if they wanted say, half a dozen of each; unfortunately the creatives wanted thousands and thousands of infatuated females…

The Mill approached the challenge from two angles. The work would be a combination of pain-staking Flame work headed up by Giles Cheetham and advanced crowd creation work made in 3D by a team led by Rick Walia and Eric Deltour.

After the live action shoot in Los Angeles the complex post production began. A motion capture session was carried out using the excellent AudioMotion facilities. This featured girls of different body shapes walking, running, wading and climbing. Their movements were digitally recorded to give the CG models natural movement and flow. Using the Oscar winning software Massive, armies of girls were created to stream across the various types of terrain. The software, made for The Lord of the Rings trilogy, allowed the artificial girls to have their own ‘brains’ meaning they could react to each other and alter their behaviour accordingly. These intelligent Massive girls were then set free to interact with the live action girls and the composited flame girls.

The final shot posed a particular challenge and was an impressive effect to achieve. The task was tackled by taking the original plate and matching in a matte painting eight times the size of the shot – creating an artificial horizon. The 3D geometry was added and then the plate was populated with over 100,000 CG girls.

The commercial was great fun to work on but threw up a number of challenges along the way. Tracking over water is difficult at the best of times and tracking swimmers over water from a moving helicopter was particularly tricky. As well as using their talented team, The Mill received some additional consultancy from software manufacturer, Boujou for a joint effort in achieving the result. The shot was finally defeated by a combination of hand tracking and some expert Boujou knowledge.

View the spot here!

The Mill, London
40-41 Great Marlborough Street
Soho, London W1F 7JQ
+44 20 7287 4041
info@the-mill.com

The Mill, New York
451 Broadway 5th floor
New York NY 10013
+1 212 337 3210
info@the-mill.com

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Troika Design Group was selected earlier this year to create a new on-air experience for Animal Planet, a network from Discovery Communications, the leading global real-world media and entertainment company. Troika handled all aspects of the project, including concept, design and production.

“The goal for Animal Planet was to visually align the network with a style and attitude that would resonate with our viewers and bring to life the amazing connections that humans and animals share with each other and the world,” commented Gheri Arnold, VP Creative Director for Animal Planet.

To achieve this, Troika deconstructed the world in which animals and people exist, and found that “Horizons” were consistent horizontal lines found within nature, such as a sun setting over water. With this framework in mind, the team poured over hours of footage to locate the most compelling material that would bring the “horizon” motif to life. The new look, which includes promos, menus, bumpers, IDs, show opens and other on-air elements, debuted on Animal Planet June 9th.

“Animal Planet reflects mankind’s eternal fascination with the creatures that share our world and Troika’s challenge was to keep animals in their natural environments while also putting them front and center in the new brand identity,” said Arnold. “In addition, the network attracts both an adults and kids audience, so we needed to create a smart, clever, fun and awe-inspiring attitude that would translate well across those demographics.”

Animal Planet’s new on-air identity features imagery of the wild animal kingdom and domestic pets. The color palette is a vibrant array of verdant greens, oceanic blues, desert golds and icy grays. Smart and clever editorial language is mixed with playful typographic treatments to create network IDs that juxtapose type with image-a bee pollinating a flower corresponds with the copy, “To BEE or not to BEE,” while another ID has a starfish clinging to a rock at incoming tide, with the super “Rockstar.” Navigational elements employ similar techniques. Text is animated to move across the screen, mimicking the motion of an alligator creeping through water to announce what’s next on Animal Planet.

Troika Executive Creative Director Dan Pappalardo and Creative Director Reid Thompson oversaw the design team. Lead designer Heather Kim worked closely with Animal Planet to sift through hundreds of hours of wildlife material sourced from stock houses and the Animal Planet Library to find clips that had the horizontal line and that represented the breadth and diversity of the animal kingdom. Troika also incorporated environmental textures as a way to extend the nature shots without altering them graphically. These backgrounds-grass, ice, sand-function as panels to support different program titles or other text.

Said Dan Pappalardo, Executive Creative Director, Troika, “When we initially started putting this package together, it felt almost like a research project. We sought artful ways to brand existing wildlife clips in a way that would engage Animal Planet’s audience demographic-ranging from kids to us adults-while still maintaining the integrity of the breathtaking footage. This was our first time collaborating with Animal Planet and we were very fortunate that they trusted us implicitly and gave us a lot of creative freedom to experiment with the look.”

About Troika Design Group
Troika is an award-winning design company known for producing memorable visual brand identities. Based in Hollywood, Troika combines a unique hybrid of skills with a team of more than 20 designers, producers, animators, editors and conceptual thinkers who specialize in network branding, promotional and advertising campaigns, and show packaging. Founded in 2001 by industry leaders Dan Pappalardo, Mark Bohman and Chuck Carey, Troika is one of the premier providers of strategic design and creative production for television. The company’s approach to design is clever, thoughtful and focused, delivering standout concepts while remaining faithful to a client’s brand ideals. Troika has worked closely with top television and cable networks including The CW, FOX, ESPN, HGTV, E! Entertainment, Food Network, ABC, UPN, Comedy Central, Fine Living, VH1, TV Guide Channel and Great American Country. For more information, please visit www.troika.tv or call Robert Blatchford at 323.965.1650.

About Animal Planet
Animal Planet, available in more than 88 million homes nationwide, is the only television network dedicated exclusively to the connection between humans and animals. The network brings people of all ages together by tapping into a fundamental fascination with animals through an array of fresh programming that includes humor, competition, drama and spectacle from the animal kingdom. Animal Planet is a property of Discovery Communications, the leading global real-world media and entertainment company.

PRODUCTION CREDITS
Client: Animal Planet/Discovery Communications, Inc.
Airdate: June 9, 2006

Production/Design Company: Troika Design Group/Los Angeles, CA
Executive Creative Director: Dan Pappalardo
Creative Director: Reid Thompson
Executive Producers: Holly Eddy, Chuck Carey
Designer: Heather Kim
Producer: Joan Zierler
Writer: Tom Pace
Animators: Mark McConnell, Jim McDaniels, Anthony Honn
Design Assistants: Mindy Park, Hema Mulchandani
Editor: Tim Samuel
Coordinator: Jessica Choquette
Composer: Rob Cairns

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Rainmaker Ltd. Partnership (Rainmaker) completed 170 CG shots on the new Fox release, GARFIELD: A TAIL OF TWO KITTIES. Full CG face replacements were completed on the film’s new character, Winston the bulldog, and on eight other talking animals. Completing the task in just eight weeks, the Rainmaker team was led by visual effects supervisor Charlene Eberle and visual effects producer Jinnie Pak.

Rainmaker also collaborated on the original GARFIELD (2004). For this sequel, Rainmaker created two talking ducks, a goose, a parrot, a bull, a Rottweiller, a rabbit, a rat and the British bulldog butler named Winston.

Eberle explained, “The biggest challenge at the start of the project was the Winston character. We were originally very excited about him because bulldogs have short fur, and in CG, longhaired animals always pose a larger problem. But what we didn’t account for were the complexities of his face.”

Using real bulldog plates to replace just the face, Eberle and her team quickly found that a bulldog has many folds, jowls and markings, and at any given camera angle the real dog would look very different. In fact, the Rainmaker team asked if production had possibly used a stand-in dog at any time. They realized that the only consistent element with Winston was his lower jaw fur patch.

“The first hurdle was locking down a grey scale model of Winston that included all his correct facial anatomy. Once we got that down, we hit the ground running. Then the challenge became, as usual, a very short post schedule.”

For the film, in addition to proprietary software, Rainmaker used LightWave 8.5, Fusion 4, Sasquatch, Fprime, FrameCycler and Boujou 3.

Warren Franklin, president Rainmaker Animation & Visual Effects, added, “We’re very proud of our CG team and their continued growth. Charlene, Jinnie and the entire crew delivered some tough work in a very short amount of time. We managed the schedule by having two shifts, which helped us tremendously. Our crew grew from 30 to 50 animators on this project.”

Rainmaker worked closely with Chris Bailey, animation supervisor on both the original GARFIELD and this sequel. On the collaboration, Bailey commented, “For GARFIELD 2, with nothing more to animate than his face, the animators at Rainmaker were able to make Winston a full fledged character able to hold his own next to the fully animated Garfield.”

In the Vancouver facility, Rainmaker is currently working on BLADES OF GLORY, NIGHT AT THE MUSEUM and VANTAGE POINT and in London, BUTTERFLY ON A WHEEL.

Rainmaker Ltd. Partnership (Rainmaker, www.rainmaker.com) is an award-winning visual effects, 3D animation and post production company with a 27- year history of technical excellence and outstanding service in feature films, television, games and commercials. From its origins in the pioneering west coast post house Gastown Prods., Rainmaker has grown into one of North America’s pre-eminent post-production service providers. Rainmaker recently opened a new facility in London: Rainmaker Animation and Visual Effects UK Ltd. (Rainmaker UK), which offers cutting edge visual effects and 3D animation in that market. Rainmaker’s Vancouver facility continues to provide a wide array of post production services ranging from traditional film developing to the very latest in digital image processing, visual effects and computer-generated animation.

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Autodesk has announced that its technology was used to create HDTV content for the 2006 FIFA World Cup. Autodesk solutions provide digital artists with the creative tools and processing power necessary to quickly and efficiently produce content containing the level of detail required for HDTV programming. Post-production facilities that relied on Autodesk technology include: Deep Blue Sea, Locomotion, METAphrenie, Method Studios and The Mill.

The World Cup occurs every four years and is one of the most widely viewed sporting events worldwide. It is estimated that 2.8 billion viewers tuned in for the event in 2002, with an audience of 1.1 billion for the final match alone. This year, the tournament is being held in twelve German cities from June 9 to July 9. It is airing entirely in high definition for the first time.

METAphrenie, a Berlin-based design and production company, created the Adidas “Impossible Team” commercial with Autodesk Maya 3D animation software. This entirely computer-generated ad features the Adidas +F50 TUNIT and +Predator Absolute soccer shoes, as well as the gold and black Adidas +Team Geist matchball that will be used in the final World Cup match. Artists at METAphrenie used Autodesk Maya software to model, texture and animate all aspects of the commercial, including: the spot’s two main characters, soccer players’ legs and feet, the Adidas products and the environment.

In addition, Autodesk’s Discreet Flame system was used by The Mill to create “Football Dream”, a commercial for the UK-based bank Nationwide Building Society. This humorous ad promotes the society’s longstanding relationship with the England soccer team. In the ad, the bank manager made famous in previous Nationwide Building Society commercials falls asleep while speaking to a client about loan rates. He dreams that he is a soccer goalie who is only one penalty save away from winning the World Cup for England. After taunting the penalty taker, the bank manager makes a victorious save with an overhead scissor kick.

Post-production facility Locomotion used a variety of Autodesk products to create a commercial for a mobile phone network — O2 Germany. In the spirit of the World Cup, the ad shows four German soccer legends engaging in an impromptu soccer scrimmage inside one of their homes. As they play, the walls of the house fly away and a soccer stadium is exposed. Autodesk Maya was used to create the ad’s stylized 3D world, including the house, furniture, balls, stadium, shadows and mobile phones. Autodesk Combustion desktop visual effects software was also used for b-spline rotoscoping work and pre-composites, while the Discreet Flame system was used for high-definition finalization.

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Mechnology Visual Effects Studio recently helped Director John Kretchmer and UPN bring the second season of “Veronica Mars” to a heart pounding, edge-of-the-cliff conclusion, according to Chip Potter, Mechnology’s Executive Producer.

Having previously provided visual effects for Kretchmer on other shows, Mechnology worked with on-set VFX Supervisor Gerard Black to help send a character off an ocean side cliff to his death in the surf 100 feet below. This involved a real stuntman hanging on the hood of a car and a 3D “stuntman” created to match by the Mechnology team. The actual stuntman was first positioned on the car and driven across a parking lot towards a concealed trench equipped with a stuntpad. When the car came to a sudden stop, the stuntman was thrown rolling into the ditch onto the stuntpad.

Mechnology’s Lead 3D Artist, Mike Walls, used reference shots of the stuntman taken on set by Black and digital pictures of the actor to model a fully rigged and textured virtual stuntman, utilizing Autodesk 3ds Max, which was carefully lined up to seamlessly replace the real stuntman. To realistically animate the character’s long plunge into the ocean, Walls used 3ds Max’s physics system along with keyframe animation to finesse the final performance. Mechnology, using 3ds Max’s Mental Ray, rendered the CG ocean and shore. Mechnology took digital video reference shots of surf and waves along the Pacific Coast near Los Angeles. Elements of crashing waves were generated by Mechnology Digital Artist Ben Campanaro by isolating sections of the DV footage and then altering selected frames to match the camera’s perspective. Walls performed the final composting, adding the CG elements to the shot and removing the film crew, lighting equipment, and safety wires from the original plate.

For more information about Mechnology Visual Effects Studio, please visit: mechnology.com

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LAIKA, Inc. will build a state-of-the-art feature film animation campus to house its burgeoning entertainment division, it was announced today by President and CEO Dale Wahl. LAIKA owner and Chairman of the Board Philip H. Knight has purchased 30 acres of land in Tualatin, OR, just 12 miles south of Portland, as the future site of LAIKA’s world class animation facility, which is scheduled to open in 2008.

“LAIKA Entertainment has a world-class roster of talent and projects and I felt it was time to provide them with a full-time home,” said Mr. Knight. “Just as we anticipate our films will look like no others before them, so too will this campus make a bold and distinct architectural statement.”

LAIKA Entertainment’s expanding film production schedule will see its employee roster soar to over 400 within the next two years.

“The LAIKA campus is an essential part of our strategy to be a major force in the global animated film business, and will play a key role in defining the culture we want to establish for our entertainment division.” said Mr. Wahl. “This facility will be a sought after destination for the highest caliber of animation talent in the world.”

Phase one of campus construction will include buildings dedicated to CGI (Computer Generated Imagery) animation; stop motion animation, and core corporate services including reception, executive offices, conference rooms, fitness center, cafeteria and theatre. Groundbreaking is planned for early 2007 and an architectural firm and construction company will be announced shortly.

“The addition of a world class feature film animation studio to the Portland area is a major boost for the local creative community,” says Steve Oster, Executive Director of the Oregon Film & Video Office. “An undertaking of this scale also has enormous positive implications for the economic growth and cultural enrichment of the region. We’re thrilled that Phil Knight and LAIKA are stepping up to the plate in such a big way.”

About LAIKA:
LAIKA is owned by Phil Knight, co-founder and Chairman of Nike. The company was rebranded as LAIKA in the summer of 2005, when it absorbed Vinton Studios, an animation leader and innovator for more than 30 years. LAIKA Entertainment currently has two animated feature films in production and was a production entity on the Oscar(TM) nominated animated film Tim Burton’s “Corpse Bride.” “Coraline,” based on the international bestselling children’s novel by Neil Gaiman, is being adapted for the screen and directed by Henry Selick (“Nightmare Before Christmas,” “James and the Giant Peach”) with Dakota Fanning, Teri Hatcher, and the comedy duo of French & Saunders leading the voice cast. World wide distribution will be handled by Focus Features. “Jack & Ben’s Animated Adventure,” a heartwarming original story of brotherly love set in the animal kingdom, is being directed by animator and writer Jorgen Klubien. In addition, LAIKA recently acquired the film rights to one of the UK’s current bestselling children’s novels, writer/illustrator Alan Snow’s “Here Be Monsters,” and will develop it as an animated feature film.

LAIKA/house, the commercial division of the company, produces animated commercials and shorts for global clients including Coca-Cola, Wrigleys, Samsung, ESPN and Esure UK. LAIKA/house will continue to operate at the company’s current headquarters at 1400 NW 22nd Avenue in Portland.

Throughout its history, the company has won 11 CLIO Awards, three London International Advertising & Design Awards, five Mobius Advertising Awards, two Cannes Lion International Advertising Festival awards, two Academy Awards® out of five nominations, 11 Prime time Emmy Awards, and honors from the New York International Film & TV Festival, Annecy Awards, Annie Awards, and the World Animation Celebration Festival. For more information, please visit www.laika.com

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