The Operators’ creative team were talking recently about ways to promote and showcase their work in a way that set them apart from the traditional show reel approach. Ben Le Tourneau, Director of Motion, came up with an idea.

Instead of doing what everyone else was doing – compiling a montage of client samples – he wanted to make a short film that captured the essence of their unique creative style while showcasing their client work. The extraordinary result – Grey Days.

Grey Days is a ‘morning in the life’ story about a man just trying to get to work. It chronicles the annoying hassles we’ve all faced – from his car not starting, crashing his bike into a passerby on the sidewalk, discovering he has no cash for a cab ride after he’s already hailed it.

And all along his journey, he’s peppered with advertisements and promos wherever he looks; from his cell phone and iPad, to the billboards, magazines and newspapers that all come to life with moving imagery.

As you watch Grey Days, you realize the creative sophistication required to bring such imagery to life – and the challenges of some very complex VFX.

“What started off as a little idea – which was to create somewhat of a gorilla film around the streets of London – soon evolved into quite an epic project. We brought on board photographer/director Stuart McClymont to help us evolve this idea into a reality. And that’s how it all started!

Because if its increasing complexity, Grey Days ended up having to be very well organized. There were a ton of locations we wanted to film on the main character’s journey, and as this was a strictly self promotion piece, our budget was uber tight. We were adamant that we wanted to shoot this with a documentary feel so there was very little effort in prepping the locations for post production help.

“We tried a few different camera solutions, however we finally decided on the Canon 5D as it could deliver a high quality HD image, while still being lightweight and mobile enough to strap to the actors head.  We used Final Cut Pro 7 for the edit; Color for the grading; mocha Pro for Planar Tracking, roto, inserting, warping and removal and stabilizing; Adobe After Effects for all the VFX compositing; Adobe Photoshop for retouching and prepping the artwork and PFHoe for 3Dtracking.  All up it cost us three staff months to create the piece,” explains Ben Le Tourneau.

There were many different areas in some shots actually tracked. Sometimes some shots had four or five different tracking areas – all-in-all, around 70 areas/shots.

“This project could have never been achievable without mocha pro. Since we could prep each area within a shot, tracking such loose camera work, was an amazing challenge. We encountered everything possible that should have caused the tracker to fail, but it made it through the more challenging shots. Also the latest Shape export and tracking export works beautifully, which made the workflow between mocha pro and After Effects seamless,” explains Le Tourneau.

The Operator crew didn’t just use mocha for the tracker, though there were a ton of shots that needed to be stabilised,  rotoscoped and cleaned up – all of which was tackled a lot quicker in mocha Pro. “Even the ability to render out some of the insertions was a true gem; take for example ‘ether’,” says Ben. “Also, where we found serious lens distortion, the lens collaboration tool really helped bed the artwork in beautifully without having to manually animate/warp the artwork each time.”

Most shots would have failed using conventional tracking techniques, however tracking the newspapers and magazines were very challenging. “But what we found was, as long as you track from the right frame and animate and nurse the spline/tracking areas, a close and create a natural effect is achieved. ‘Adjust track’ was also very helpful,” he explains.

With purse strings pulling ever tighter, and the ever expanding delivery platform opportunities like web, D,O,O,H iPads, The Operator crew wanted to show that high-end VFX work can be done without the hero suite costs. “Our ability to do VFX within a reasonable budget is something I feel really strongly about,” says Ben. “As desktops keep getting stronger, more opportunities are now materialising that used to be totally unobtainable.”

The Operators VFX house is finding that in the commercial field, photography is evolving from a static print-based medium to incorporate motion and become animated stills. It is with the convergence of these disciplines that they are focusing on the ability to facilitate still-to-motion campaigns, or ‘Image Motion.’  “For every still brief we work on, we can employ static and moving components to create a complimentary motion campaign for digital billboards, viral advertising and ISO. This Image Motion product pushes the boundaries of the digital medium and broadens the scope of the photographic/static output.”

Watch Grey Days on motion.tv

Credits:

A Film by:
The Operators

Directed by:
Stuart McClymont

Prosthetics:
Bill Turpin

Sound:
Tom Lowe

Music by:
Madness ‘Grey Days’

Cast:
Adam Morris, Sally Deane, Kai Bastard, Ben Le Tourneau, Scott Freeman, James O’Neill, Joey Grange

Have you had the pleasure of meeting Brian Bowman yet?

Whenever we meet someone, they’re always introduced by their title. Brian Bowman is the Creative Director at Nice Shoes. Kinda leaves you wanting more, doesn’t it?

So, I’m just going to dwell on one word in Brian’s title. Creative.

Brian Bowman is indeed creative. No questions asked. He is passionate about his work.

So what happens if you take a creative person like Brian, and put him in an environment that nurtures creativity – like the New York-based studio, Nice Shoes? Verses: Found.

Verses: Found
Manhattan. 7 am on a Sunday in September, 2009. Sitting on a park bench in front of a Korean deli, locked out of my building. It was a cool, beautiful morning typical of early September, which made it hard for me to be grumpy about my predicament. The sun was coming up later and lower, an indication of autumn’s approach. A piece of paper blew up against my foot. I picked it up. It was a poem, with no name or signature.

The more I read, the more I wondered about the poem’s anonymous author. Who wrote this and why? I began to conceive of a film that would speculate on the author’s intentions and words. There was an intrinsic tension to the abstract verses; one line implied gratitude while the next deferred it. Visually, what would that look like, what could that be?

Nice Shoes recently produced a series of stereoscopic 3D poetry-based shorts they call “Verses”. Poetry mixed with visual effects is an unusual combination. But that was part of the challenge. The artist – Brian Bowman in this case, took a short poem and interpreted it visually. He based his creation on a poem that he literally found scrawled on a piece of paper that caught on his shoe as he was walking down a street in New York City. Artist unknown.

This is elaine montoya – chief imagination office at the motion group. Come meet Brian Bowman – along with many of the top creative minds in the motion picture, broadcast, and design industries.

Join Nice Shoes Creative Director Brian Bowman as he describes making the film Found (part of the Verses series) in a discussion about life, happenstance and the cathartic process of filmmaking. Tuesday, October 11, 2011 at motion.

view Brian’s reel on motion.tv »

// feed your brain //

Q. Why should I be at motion?

// THE RIGHT BRAIN //
A 3-minute Short…Everyday
Elastic Spaces
Exploring the Intersection of Advertainment and Storyselling
Failure is Not an Option
Fresh Out of the Starting Gate
Change with a Changing Industry
Getting There: Real Life RPG
HAX Double Vision
If These Walls Could Talk
If You’re Good at Something, Stop Doing It
Industry Timeline: Return of the Swiss Army Knife
Kinda Makes You Think…
Look From a New Angle, Change What You See
Mashup: Transforming Movie Scores
Now THAT’s Creative!
Removing My Cat’s Dingleberry: Notable Achievements
Standing Out from the Crowd
Taking Care of Business. And You.
The Lost Art of Original Music in Advertising
Walking Through Walls
When Time is of the Essence
Verses: Found

\\ THE LEFT BRAIN \\
100m2 in the Palm of Your Hand
3D Broadcast Graphics: After Effects + Cinema 4D
3D Broadcast Graphics: From Sketch to Screen with Cinema 4D
Audio Post-Production Basics for Video Professionals
Beyond Keyframes: // LAB
Creating 3D Titles – Yesterday
Creating Custom Looks…in 20 Minutes!
Creating the TRON Legacy Title Animation Effect
Destruction City Trailer: Adding Effects that Sizzle
Forward into the Past: History in Motion
FOX’s Fringe: 3D Text Effect
HDSLR Editing with Adobe CS5.5 Production Premium
Lean, Mean, After Effects Machine
Lean, Mean, Premiere Machine
Learning C4D: Creative Camera Movement // LAB
Open Workflows with Adobe CS5.5 Production Premium
Planar Tracking for Graphics & Effects
Professional Video: The Adobe Roadmap
Putting it all Together: My Strong Suite
Roto Brush and Warp Stabilizer: Shortcuts to Higher Production Values
Stereo Conversion for Film & Broadcast
Sweetening Your Audio with Adobe Audition
The Edge
The Graphics Factory
The RED Workflow Acceleration Secret: Now You Know
The Reel World: Final Cut Pro to Premiere Pro // LAB
Title Design from Concept to Screen: On Little or No Budget!
Track the Impossible: Using mocha and CameraTracker in After Effects
Upending Identity Crisis
Using Effects in Final Cut Pro X
Using Motion to Create Effects for Final Cut Pro X
Who’d a Thunk It!?!
Vector Art is your BFF: Illustrator and After Effects
What’s new in Adobe CS5.5 Production Premium
You’ve got Flash in my After Effects // LAB

A. To feed my brain.