This film was commissioned by a collaborative organisation consisting of the Saudi Government Transport Ministry and the Mineral Mining companies in the North of the country.
Tasked with producing a film that not only provided an interesting way of relaying information about the proposed project, we also needed to provide a show piece for the opening ceremony in the desert that was attended by the King himself, to officially start the enormous operation involved in this railway project. The railway itself is the biggest engineering feat ever undertaken in the world, phase one is covered in the film, linking the North and South of Saudi Arabia from the mineral rich mountains to Riyadh and the coastal ports.

After weeks of pre production planning, storyboarding and casting, both in London and Riyadh, we split into two filming units for the project. Unit one went on a journey through Saudi, filming landscape, factory, town and building works for all the cut-aways and train plates. Unit two, shot the main visual effects and scripted parts. Starting in a tower block looking over Riyadh’s flat landscape, we created a set for an architects office, before grabbing some more material outside in the Riyadh streets. The next day we moved into the desert for the bulk of the shooting, which was a challenging environment to shoot in, especially with the wind and swirling sand. We still needed to shoot some greenscreen material for the train interior, before getting the flights back to London to begin the edit and post production.
We edited on Avid Media Composer, onlined in Avid DS and created the 3D cgi in Autodesk Maya with Thumbprint Animation. Avid DS composited a majority of the shots, along with Autodesk Discreet Flint. We used Adobe After Effects for the map sequences and some of the demonstration effects.

Client: Saudi Arabian Railways / OR Madarat

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The Touchphone was shot on a rig by a motion control camera unit in a soho studio, spinning gently in the light source against a black backdrop. The footage was edited and the rigs removed, screen artwork animation was inserted into the unit and the reflections were keyed back on top to inset the imagery. The ribbon and streak animations were created in After Effects and the final commercial was composited and finished in Autodesk Discreet Smoke.

Client: HTC Corp

The second commercial in the British Gas campaign features Jake in the bath receiving a phone call from his Mum. She is in the Antarctic checking in to see that her sons new found fame isn’t corrupting him, when he tells her about the new deal from British Gas.
As before the copy writing and storyboard stage was finalised first with the agency creatives, before work began on creating the new character design that was needed for Jake’s Mum and the other penguins that feature in the commercial. The shoot for this one was a much more contained set which was dressed beautifully, as a film star like Jake would expect. There are some nice details in the production design, including a penguin shaped Oscar, Jake’s personalised towels, and the blue fish bath toys who pop up to make an appearance. As well as requiring multiple passes of each shot that contained foreground elements, we used a motion control camera rig so that every pass would line up correctly at the compositing stage as well as ensuring the shots were really smooth camera moves. A good example of the use of motion control on this project was the shot of the bathroom, where Jake can just be seen behind the glass splash back and plant. With this shot we needed 5 separate passes that all matched exactly, a clean bathroom with no bath, a clean bathroom with bath, a steam pass, a glass splash back pass, and the plant by itself against bluescreen. Once the shoot had wrapped, the 35mm rushes were transferred and graded by a C-Reality telecine suite, before the edit was made and the shots supplied for the 3d computer generated animation stage. The live action set shots were tracked in Maya live and boujou, and that tracking data was used by Maya to place the penguin model and animation into the scene where Jake’s facial expressions, flipper movements and beak action could be tweaked and adjusted to match the voiceover that had been recorded and edited previously. The Antarctica scenes with Jake’s Mum were made entirely in Maya, aside from some photographic reference and texture material for the backgrounds. The animation, texturing, lighting and rendering stage took several weeks before the whole commercial was brought to life in the Autodesk Discreet Flame compositing suite. Jake was integrated fully into the scenes with all his layers, highlight and shadow passes, mattes, separate eyes and more. Steam was added, bubbles and foam were animated in, reflections and shadows created, phone screens tracked in, foreground elements composited back over the action, subtle warping of the bath foam, phone call split screen effects, snowflakes and refracted through glass warp effects. The straplines and legal text was added and the final audio mix completed the project before final delivery and the commercial went to air.

Client: EHSRealtime / British Gas

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The British Gas campaign was a fun project and was very involved, from concept and initial brainstorming at the agency to delivering the final finished post heavy results.
After careful copy writing and storyboarding, the next stage was to begin designing the character of Jake in 3d. We knew that Jake would feature across all forms of media, need to speak, show emotion and emphasis with his movement and be flexible enough to work in different environments, so digitalia got to work with maya to create the models, textures and skeletal structure to bring Jake to life. Next we recorded a voice for Jake, and ensured that we had enough takes and lines to manipulate the timings as we needed. When it came to shooting the live action a long time was spent dressing the studio to look like a busy studio (if that makes sense), everything that can be seen on the film was carefully placed and choreographed, every light stand, cable and monitor was where it was for a reason. We shot using steadicam to give the sensation that we were seeing what the journalists cameraman was seeing, keeping a hand held shooting style caused difficulties but was necessary to fully sell this style. We used an actor who was a midget to practice getting all the timings correct so that when we shot the master take, everyone involved in the shot would know where to be and when. Because the commercial is effectively a single shot, and there wasn’t really any penguin there, it took many takes to get a shot where everything worked and sold the idea that a penguin could realistically get from A to B in the time allowed and perform his necessary moves and lines. Once the shot was in the can and we had wrapped the set, the 35mm film was transferred and graded using telecine. We selected the best take and began the process of tracking the shot in 3d using maya live and boujou, before mocking up the 3d computer generated animation, careful to ensure that Jake hit all his marks and felt a part of the set. Once the exhaustive process of animation, texturing and lighting was completed, and the final render passes had been finished, the final part of the puzzle was to composite Jake into the shot, layering all the animation passes, retouching the shot, removing tracking markers, inserting the video feeds into the monitors, matting foreground elements, adding shadows, powder puffs, the mirror reflection and the camera graticule effects. All the compositing and effects work was carried out on Autodesk Discreet Flame. The straplines and legal text was added and the final audio mix done.

Client: EHSRealtime / British Gas

Rolls Royce wanted to create an MMS for their new convertible. Aimed at a very, very select number of customers, Rolls Royce was still putting the final touches to the car. So most of it had to remain seductively hidden, meaning that the car had to be shown off without actually seeing the car, or at least much of it. The whole production was turned around in seven days. Shot by Whitedog Productions, using tight close ups, delicate movements and sensual lighting to create the intrigue the car needed on the smallest of screens.
The commercial was finished by DazPix using Autodesk Discreet Flint, online edit, grading, compositing and retouching, and enhancing the beautiful shots. The final shot of the car was constructed from various different shots and elements, and heavily treated so as not to give away too many clues about the final look of the car itself.

Client: Rolls Royce / Whitedog Productions

Rolls Royce wanted to produce a Christmas viral for the Phantom. It was decided to create an homage to the ground-breaking 1963 Volkswagen ‘Snowplough’ commercial (“Have you ever wondered how the man who drives the snowplough drives to the snowplough?”). However, it was already November; the budget was tight and the production values had to be sky-high. The scenes were shot in a blizzard in the mountains to the east of Rome by Whitedog Productions. After editing the result was a frame for frame match to the original commercial. The commercial was finished by DazPix using Autodesk Discreet Flint, grading, compositing additional snow layers into most shots, making the transition from snow plough to Phantom and back to snow plough, and enhancing the vehicles lights.

Client: Rolls Royce / Whitedog Productions

Shobily Port is an enormous business development park built in the shape of a gigantic key which is so big, it can be seen on satellite images taken from space.
This 1.6 billion dollar sprawling development stretches for 7 kilometers along the Khobar beach-front. Encompasing 7-million square meters, the development includes luxurious residential towers, high-class retail, tourism and entertainment facilities. At the center of this deluxe project is the Middle East’s first “Floating Mall” bringing a taste of Venice to the heart of the Arab World.

The commercial was shot in South Africa using a combination of underwater photography, greenscreen and live action with purpose built sets on 35mm film. The film was transferred and graded back in London before the edit, visual effects and compositing were finished on Avid Composer and Discreet Flint. Cityscape and additional elements were sourced from high resolution photography.

Client: Khaled Saud Al Shobily / OR Madarat

The commercial was shot on 35mm film in London using projectors to create many of the effects in camera. The film was transferred and graded in Ursa Diamond telecine suite, before the visual effects and compositing were finished on Autodesk Discreet Flame.

Client: Grey London

These 3 commercials, ‘Balloons’, ‘Label’ and ‘Bounce’ formed a short campaign for the new fabric softener. Each 10 second commercial was a combination of live action footage, model manipulation and traditional cell animation.

First the backplates were shot on 35mm film using a motion control rig. The yellow silky cloth, bottle label and white towels for each film were manipulated in camera with small rigs for the baby animation to fit into later. Once the takes had been transferred by telecine and graded, the selected shots were brought into Autodesk Discreet Flint for re timing, subtle warping where the rigs needed help, general cleaning up, rig removal and retouching. These clean shots were exported as file sequences in ‘doubles’ or ‘two’s for the animators to begin matching the baby cell line drawings to the live action. Once the exhaustive phase of traditional animation was complete, the cells were scanned and brought back into Flint, where each frame was cleaned, enhanced and then coloured before layering all the separate parts of the baby together into a master clip. Each frame consisted of 12 layers of cell animation, including several highlight and lowlight passes, shadow passes, cheeks rosiness, nappy passes and the main head and body layers. The final baby was then composited into the live action where the reflections, shadows and subtle enhancements were added to make the baby seem to be part of the original shot. The balloons on the first commercial were modelled and animated in Maya and composited in Flint.

Client: Itch / Leo Burnett

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A short commercial film for Cadburys Creme Eggs, composited and finished in Discreet Flame by DazPix.

Client: Cadburys / M&C Saatchi