Launch – 30s
[See post to watch Flash video]

Here are two spots we completed for Kentucky Lottery in early January. In addition to the digital animation treatment, we also used a practical puppet rig for the dollars to achieve a more organic visual look. A fun challenge for the team!

Here are some photos from the production shoot:

Pixel Farm Credits

Director
Rich Haesemeyer

Storyboard Artist
Joe Russo

Puppeteers
Alicia Reece
Joe Russo

3D Artists + Animators
Amanda Nelson
Joe Russo
Rich Haesemeyer
Zac Leckscheid

Compositors
Eric Schulist
Rich Haesemeyer

Pixel Farm Credits

3D Character Artist
Billy Thiex

3D Character Rigging Artist + CG Environment Artist + FX Artist (Smoke) + Animator + Lighting Artist + Compositor
Joe Russo

I animated the “Standability” section and the final hero shot of the Corn Bin building and transforming into the coffee mug. One of my co-workers figured out a efficient way to change rotation direction on the cubes using mel scripting and custom attributes. All you would need to do is translate it in a direction and it would rotate 90 degrees per grid unit. Without this the project would not have been possible within the deadline, since each cube basically needed to be individually animated.

For example, my workflow for the corn bin was to animate one cube or a row of cubes, copy, paste, offset timing, followed by manual refinement of each cube based on where the camera was. Particles, dynamic sims, etc were just not giving us the result needed, so we went with the most straight forward approach. It was a lot of grunt work, but a good learning experience for pipelining / animation efficiency.

Pixel Farm Credits

3D Artists + Animators
Chad Retrum
Eric Schulist
Joe Russo
Pail Wilson
Rich Haesemeyer
Tom Doeden

Compositors
Eric Schulist
Rich Haesemeyer
Tom Doeden

Colorist
Dave Sweet

Steve Glutton

Ah, finally some personal stuff! Here are animation tests for the characters of my next animated short: Ninja… Squirrel?!

These are mostly for motion timing / flow and acting. There are obvious intersections with cloth and skinning that will be addressed on a per shot basis (although skinning has been fixed now). These also have allowed me to set up my render layers and make master character files so that I don’t have to worry about render layer setup once my shots are done, for the characters at least.

Enjoy!

Ok, this update isn’t anything visually spectacular, and it’s not supposed to be. I want to show the technical process of something that is fast and looks simple, because there are still a lot of steps that go into live action tracking / integration.

The spot needed a 3D grapple with a rope to be tracked in, so I modeled the grapple, hand tracked it in maya using the footage as a backplate, simulated the rope using nCloth, and simulated the smoke using FumeFX.

Pixel Farm Credits

3D Artist + Animator + FX Artist
Joe Russo

Compositor
Tom Doeden

3D Artists + Animators
Eric Schulist
Joe Russo
Rich Haesemyer
Tom Doeden

Compositors
Eric Schulist
Rich Haesemeyer
Tom Doeden

Colorist
Dave Sweet

Pixel Farm Credits

Designer
Deb Kirkeeide

3D Artists + Animators
Joe Russo
Rich Haesemeyer

Compositors
Eric Schulist
Rich Haesemeyer
Tom Doeden

Colorist
Oscar Oboza

Sound Designers
Jesse Marks
Ken Chastain
Zac Bates