SG//Arts, a design and motion graphics studio, has completed the new main title, graphics package and show open for the fourth season of Bravo’s Emmy-nominated “Project Runway.”
Host supermodel Heidi Klum heads a panel of industry luminaries including judges Micheal Kors, top women’s and men’s wear designer, and Nina Garcia, “Elle” magazine fashion director, as they decide who is “in” and who is “out.” Tim Gunn, Chief Creative Officer at Liz Claiborne, Inc. will once again act as mentor to the contestants as they navigate weekly fashion challenges. The new season premiered Wednesday, November 14th on Bravo.
According to Dan Cutforth, Executive Producer for “Project Runway,” this is the fourth year in a row that SG//Arts has been collaborating with his team. “I think Scott is an amazing creative talent,” he says. “From the beginning, he has delivered a wonderfully stylish graphic look and feel for the show, and this year’s main title is the best yet.”
For SG//Arts’ Creative Director/Partner Scott Grossman, he agrees that this fourth season of “Project Runway” has been the most rewarding from a creative standpoint. “The look for ‘Project Runway’ has evolved and changed, while the main structure has remained somewhat the same. This year, we wanted to freshen up the look, so we brightened it up by using color and made it very vivid. Overall, I think this year’s look is the strongest visually.”
Neil Berkeley, Executive Producer/Partner for SG//Arts was on-set to capture the footage of the 15 new contestants/designers. “The show is so much about the personalities, so when we interview the new designers, we have to capture in just 30-seconds what makes them unique, and what characteristics define them. For this year, we worked on speeding up the tempo. People know what the show is about, so Bravo wanted to pick up the pace and make the open a bit more kinetic, which really worked.”
Other new projects SG//Arts is currently working on include “Top Chef” Season 4 for Bravo, “The Real Housewives of OC” for Bravo, and “Everyday Baking” with Martha Stewart for MSLO Productions.
About SG//Arts:
Founded in 2004, SG//Arts is a full-service broadcast design and motion graphics studio. The company’s clients look to SG//Arts for all of their broadcast design and production needs. SG//Arts’ focus is to create a unique brand identity for its clients’ projects. In doing so, they draw influence from the art world, music and the city itself. Working in close collaboration with clients, SG//Arts is able to create a final package that combines the original appeal of an SG//Arts design with the unique individuality of each client’s brand. In addition to design and broadcast animation, SG//Arts also offers its clients the following services: production, editorial, 3D design and animation and music/audio.
Refinement. Some of the best looking VFX work out there comes not from radical new tricks or expensive kit, but from the simple refinement of existing techniques – craft, in other words.
Following on from the recent success for Next of the Ali’s Party spot, director Ben Hume-Paton and producer David Hay for Love have come up with Nextmas, in which we follow the further adventures of supermodel and quick change artiste Alessandra Ambrosia and her new beau (Paul Sculfor), as they enjoy a festive evening out on the town.
As before, Flame Supervision for Framestore CFC was by Stephane Allender. A seasoned compositor and VFX Supervisor, Allender has found that these Next spots have offered him the perfect opportunity to refine one of the many visual tropes that digital technology has made possible. Transformations – where the actors and environments in a scene can be changed in half the blink of an eye, without interrupting the action – have been practised by digital artists for many years now. “The trick is not just to do it,” confides Allender, “But to do it better than anyone else has.”
Supervising the shoot in Edinburgh for Framestore CFC was Creative Director, Mike McGee. “It took us three nights to get all the material we needed,” says McGee, “We decorated a 200m stretch of Prince’s Street in full winter and Christmas finery, though this was also enhanced by Stephane during post. Ben (Hume-Paton) was keen to build on the first commercial (Ali’s Party) in terms of the sophistication of the ways in which we could weave the clothing switches seamlessly into the action.”
In the spot’s 60 second incarnation, we first catch sight of our heroine as she readies herself for her date. Her boyfriend is waiting outside, but she turns down a ride on the back of his motorbike in favour of a bus. Alighting in a busy high street, the couple walk past a branch of Next before arriving at their destination, a festively decked out restaurant. We cut to them leaving, and – to the couple’s delight – it has begun to snow outside. As all of this action proceeds swiftly along, Alessandra manages to change her outfit numerous times, as does her partner. Even in one ‘blink-and-you’ll-miss-it’ moment the mannequins in the Next window get in on the quick change action.
Built into this snappily shot and edited series of scenes is a sense of constant motion. Having both camera and heroine rarely still worked dramatically, to convey a sense of all the work of setting up, but it also helped Allender to better do his job. “Ben was a superb choreographer of the transition moments,” says Allender, “They had to look as natural as possible, and could be helped considerably by having plenty of movement occurring at the instant of change. We had an initial meeting during which we described to Ben the sort of material that would work best, and he took that and really ran with it.” Telecine on the spot was provided by Framestore CFC colourist, Steffan Perry.
Nextmas
Production Company Love
Director Ben Hume-Paton
Producer David Hay
For Framestore CFC
Shoot Supervisor Mike McGee
Flame Artist Stephane Allender
Rotoscope Laura Ingram, Savneet Nagi
Colourist Steffan Perry
Producer Abby Orchard
In this comical spot for Kellogg’s Nutri-Grain, Anonymous Content’s Brad Silberling creates a world where a talking equine expresses his love for the healthy snack bar.
A thoroughbred, complete with British accent, discusses the disdainful quality of the oats and grains his master so diligently feeds him. The horse stands on his hind quarters as he gesticulates the point with his front legs, and partakes of the delicious, quality goodie. This high bred fancies work, hard jumping and racing, so he makes sure to take time to enjoy the good life with Nutri-Grain.
About Anonymous Content
Anonymous Content is an industry-leading production and management firm that leverages its unrivaled reach and access to talent to create and produce innovative content across all its divisions: Film, Integrated, Commercials, Music Video, Television, and Talent.
Anonymous Content was formed in 1999 by a collaboration of business and creative minds responsible for developing some of the industry’s most respected entertainment and branded content. In launching the firm, the founders combined their unique talents, distinct vision for the future of content creation, and unmatched industry access. Since then, Anonymous has been able to extend its reach across entertainment, exercising its capacity to package talent and mine literary material from deep and powerful resources.
The Creds
Client: Kellogg’s
Spots Title: Mobile
Air Date: November 2007
Agency: Leo Burnett International
CD: Billy Mawhinney
Art Director: Monty Verdi
Agency Producer: Graeme Light
Prod Company: Anonymous Content
Director: Brad Silberling
EP/Head of Commercials: Dave Morrison
Head of Production: Sue Ellen Clair
Producer: Nadine Brown
Editorial: Union Editorial/LA
Editor: Nick Lofting
EP: Michael Raimondi
Producer: Joe Ross
Post/Effects: Riot/SM
VFX Supervisor: Andrew MacDonald
VFX Producer: Robert Owens
CG Supervisor: Bryant Reif
In January of 2008, Fox aired the pilot episode of their new series, Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, nabbing some of the highest ratings ever seen by the network. The pilot episode pushed the limits of visual effects for television, with Zoic Studios at the helm. Taking into account the previous two movies (Terminator 3 doesn’t exist in episodic arc), and huge fan base of the franchise, Zoic Studios proved that Terminator could live on TV.
VFXtalk moderator, Saeed Faridzadeh, was able to organize a video interview with some the VFX crew on the pilot episode of The Sarah Connor Chronicles; a VFXtalk exclusive. VFX Supervisor Jim Lima was kind enough to take some time out of his busy schedule to talk to us about his involvement with the new Series. Also in the video, Lead Compositor, Lane Jolly, gives away some the secrets that help the team achicve the realistic look of the iconic killing machine, in his talk about compositing, passes, and issues they had to work around. 3d artists Steve Graves, and Lee Carlton where are generous to sit down with us and talk about their involvement with the show.
The Sarah Connor Chronicles
From the creators of Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines comes The Sarah Connor Chronicles. Set after the events of Terminator 2: Judgment Day the Connors find themselves being stalked by Skynet’s agents from the future. Realizing their nightmare isn’t over, they decide to stop running and focus on preventing the birth of Skynet. VFXTalk is pleased to bring you this exclusive interview with the Team at ZOIC Studios who helped to make the awesome graphics you find in the series a reality!
Zoic Studios – Visual Evolution in VFX
Zoic is a company of accomplished artists and producers who understand story, process, and relationships. Our team has a proven record of success. They are masters in their fields of 3D, Compositing, and Production Management. Their reputations, in turn, attract additional talent and encourage a strong work ethic.
Jim Lima It was an initial meeting here with the executive producers David Netter, Josh Freedman the writer, and James Middleton, executive producer, who also came up with the idea of doing Terminator as a TV series.
There are certain iconic elements in our society that you can say that this is part of the modern mythology of our times and Terminator fits into that, it part of our language, it part of our slang, and it also part of, the kind of foundation of where science fiction films and books and television kind of extrapolate from, and so yes the first reaction was, you can’st blow this, you can not blow this.
The Nuke Blast
Steve Graves The Nuke Blast was a big sequence, and I can’st remember the guys name who did the initial blast, I think he used blast code in Maya to blow the building up, that was all done with that. As far as 2D, a lot of it was 2D stuff, alot of debris flying by, and you know what not, a lot of it was 2D.
Lane Jolly Amongst, especially the building explosion, when CG came in it was mainly at the point right when the action starts, you see the bomb go off in the background you see a shockwave come through the building, that when the actual building was projected onto a CG geometry, which then it was ripped apart, so as the CG guy made the ‘building exploding’ I animated a mask to reveal the CG. So I just used that as a cover to translate between the two.
The building was broken down really, like into two passes, the main pass that really helped was the depth pass which allowed me to put in smoke and dust and grade elements, indepth where I see fit, that would help to get the shot to look right, glass blowing up, elements
The skin ripping off shot was pretty fun, because we had to go from a guy to a terminator in like ten frames, and it nukable so it going to hit him really hard, so we got a nice fire at camera element that comes round behind him and we got a bunch of little fire elements to come out of his insides and like air pockets that pop open and burn up and we had Bob Shappen to do lots of different passes of a stand in skeleton which had the skin texture, like crackly texture all over it, skin pieces ripping off like fire elements coming off in CG we just integrated all those together with animated mattes and morphs to get it to look like its burning him from all around.
Yeah there was a lot of real fire elements integrated with CG fire and spots, mostly real fire elements were all over him, coming off all over him which I placed, little explosions coming off, which I scaled down to make them look like tiny little fires blowing off and those were all re-timed to give it some more whippiness and flames and massive gust with the explosion coming out of him.
The Terminator
The fundamental thing about the endoskeleton is that bipedal tank. It has to look like it made up from the same kind of skeletal structure as a human being it has to fit within the same kind of flesh wetsuit that you and I fit into, that all of us fit into, and that is the human skeletal structure with muscle mass and skin.
So when I looked at it in terms of upgrading the design I looked at several things, one is the first read I wanted is that when fans saw the show they would look at it and go ?‚àö√ë‚àö‚â§that a Terminator’s, and as the Terminator comes closer to frame you realize, wait a minute that a little bit different , so we were looking at the design from an engineering story, an engineering point of view and upgrading it so that it made sense to the design of the Terminator, folded that into when you look at it, it a Terminator and it didn’st change that much it just got upgraded.
Steve Graves What we’sll do is, Jim Leeman when he was on set in New Mexico, took out our little you know the little chrome ball deal, got us all of our HDRs for us, so once we had that, the Terminator is already textured so we’sre ready to start lighting so that when we’sll apply our HDR and what I’sll usually do is I will light with my main key, get the main key lit, and our fill pass we’sll use our HDRs for our fill pass, so we can give our comp artist a lot of control over it.
I’sll use an HDR for the reflection pass and I also use it for my fill pass so I can get some nice colours into the film. It mapped onto a sphere and we’sll put luminosity onto the sphere and crank up, if we’sre light we’sll use HDR exposure, we’sll crank up, we’sll mess with the whites and the blacks and get what we need out of it. It a hit or miss thing with the Terminator. Sometimes you can take ten minutes you can light him and he looks great and sometimes it might take four or five hours.
Lee Carton Realise, your beauty pass, your ?‚àö√ë‚àö‚â§all in one’s render out, is the least important of your passes. You know realizing that you need to do like a speculative pass, a reflection pass, a lighting pass, a matte pass, like you know, a red, green, blue, full iluminous pass; the compositor has that power. Because at the end of the day the full end power lies with the compositor, and how well they are put together. As a 3D artist your compositor ends up being your partner in the show, because you want to give him or her enough tools to do the job, because don’st ever expect that your beauty pass is going to end it, because no one does that.
Lane Jolly To create the shot where the Terminator is looking at the camera, like full, full face we had our normal passes, RGB which is flat colour, the diff pass which is our raw key light, the fill pass inclusion plus the raw colour, the reflection pass, then there is the speculative pass. What I did was put all the passes together, so RGB, diff, fill, reflection, spec. Diff gets put flat on, everything else is screened, graded. Once that all made you go back to the fill, and you can crush it, or turn it black and white. That gets piped into the reflection spec, that way the speculative value is dim, and they go through a dirty patch, it looks like it not really doing it but it looks like it when you comp it together.
It the same with the reflection, it gets knocked out like dirty areas, so it will be shining on the metal and those grungy parts won’st be as reflective, so it will break up the monotony and the perfectness of the CG rendering.
The Red Eye
Steve Graves In the pilot we used, in the pilot it was like 6 or 7 passes, now for the series we’sve got it down to 3 passes. So basically what it is, our render on a black terminator and eye interior, red eye interior ok it like a cylinder that goes in the back of the eye
The next pass will be the matte, which looks like a little schematic, and you know you see a little ring on the front of the terminators eye, that will be matte black and white pass and we render for that, and then we’sve got an interactive eye pass, so we’sd get the little interactive red around the eye sockets, so we’sve got it down pretty fast.
The Time Bubble
Jim Lima The Chrono sphere how it arrives is, you watch the arrival on the highway, it has a very specific arrival, you know where it starts off as a singularity, where it this one atom, this one point where it burning mass out and expanding in a very violent way till it reaches a point where it this kind of critical mass and it has a little kind of semi nuke reaction to it. There this one frame on the highway where we are kind of looking down at the traffic and you actually see a shockwave go through.
Lee Carton Thecolour of the bubble was very simple, it was more or less a sphere that we completed in a moto package, you know very simple, but we did extra work on it in Lightwave, our 3D animation package that we tend to prefer to render out of, we had a displacement map, you know with a fracton displacement where it kind of runs down the bubble itself to give it a bit of movement, stuff like that, and you know, multiple transparency maps, fracton noises and stuff that had, you know, animated fracton noises growing in size, moving back and forwards in a Z to give it somewhat of a more organic feel to the bubble as it growing.
The lighting, just because 3D and the amount of time that we had and the tools that we had to use it was much better to allow the compositors, um it was a lot quicker process for them to go ahead and add lighting to it, since it didn’st really need to be so much of a 3D feel to it, it can be achieved just by size and like you know, that creating depth to the lighting so that was handled by the 2D compositors.
Lane Jolly The Chrono sphere scene was an ordeal because you look at lightening and you see it, it like (click fingers) that, lightening is, and you wanted that feeling of thick lightening beams floating around the room. So we ended up having to go through and actually paint lightening, like in 2D animate lightening over time.
We went through like four or five different types of lighting, all 2D gags using Saphire plug ins to produce that lightening and lightening bolts and the integration came out nicely. The last thing was the metal room, with a lot of metal reflective things which produced nice little soft reflections of all the bolts everywhere. So I made it a little more violent looking.
Terminator Banging on Door
Lane Jolly The scene where we had the Terminator beating the door down was kind of a hassle because we had him hitting the green screen, but he was actually hitting the green screen so he making dimples and stuff and the shadows were being produced from the punches. So we had to take him out entirely and then replace him with the CG door which was hard because he was super focused and the door had to look like it was bending metal and reflecting him at the same time.
The hardest part of that gag was getting the reflections to play right because he was right in front of the door, so he needs to look like he (gestures), otherwise it going to be a dead give away if there was nothing reflecting. So they’sve got to move somewhat with them.
So what we ended up doing was making a mock up reflection of his hitting to be like a face on one side and made arms just hitting, just based on what he was doing and we used that as reflection just a simple gag but it worked. And we piped that into the 3D reflection map which ended up being the reflection for the door.
Invisible Shots
Lane Jolly The invisible shots in most of the glass exploding and cracks in the glass, were really simple shots but they are needed for story points, and they need to look good that why they’sre called invisible shots, but those were the ones that I was most worried about because there were a lot of them .
And the whole idea that there was one shot where the Terminator walks into the bank and breaks one of the glass, breaks the glass panel door, and it falls over, and we had shot an element where we had just a piece of glass breaking and we didn’st really get any sense of glass falling on him, he walks right through it. So we had to go in and take a bunch of different glass elements, and let them, re-time them and animate them correctly so they would look like they were bouncing off him, falling off his shoulders and stuff.
We had a lot of little stuff like that like taking squib hits, blowing them off people varying size and stuff and speed. Just to make them look right. A lot of shots were eratic, the camera was all over the place, which helped cos you were able to motion bowl a lot of things. But you also wanted to get a sense of the violence that was in it.
Programs Used:
Lane Jolly – Compositing Supervisor
Maya was used for the making of the fire for this whole sequence and a little bit of Lightwave was used as well for the fire. Combustion was used to composite it and After Effects was used to do all the re-timing for the fire.
Steve Graves – Visual Effects Artist
To do all of the uv mapping I used Mojo and then for texturing I used Projection Paint And then the final textures were applied in Lightwave.
So when we did use Maya we would take our model into Maya before we do the transfer and take it over. All the animations were done in Maya, queball it over to Lightwave.
The Neverending Process
You know you always think about what you can do differently on set, and that the thing about the film making process, is that, you know, you have a finite amount of time to plan, you have a finite amount of time to shoot, and then after you shoot you have a tremendous amount of time to study your work ?????? money back quarter yourself and everyone will tell you who is involved in this process that you always look at it and think you should have done this differently.
And so the reality is that I look at it as these were the decisions we made, and we went forward on these decisions with the limitations and the time we had, and they seemed like the right decisions to make so now in the spirit of that let do, not the best we can but the kick ass best we can with what we have. And it going to kill it.
And so from my point of view the process never really ends, what happens is that you abandon the project , and so what I mean by that is that I never really finished the pilot I had to abandon it because it had to air on tv.
And that all time we have today, I would like to thank everyone over at Zoic Studios for giving us their time to talk about Terminator ?Äì The Sarah Connor Chronicles. And be sure to catch it on Monday nights on Fox. From VFXTalk.com this is Saeed Faridzadeh.
