THE POWER OF FROG
In Japanese the word "frog" has the same sound as the word "change". In this commercial, the frog symbolizes the strength of the change that "NTT DATA" bring to Japanese companies.
Pyramid Films, a Tokyo based Agency wanted a commercial in the style of "Shera" (A commercial I did two years ago), a kind of semi-realistic cartoon design.

The creation of this commercial was quite a challenge, due to the nature of the work (water is never easy) and also due to the technical goal that we aimed. Many techniques were used here, some that I never tried in production.
Most of the shots had to be full CG (picture 1 and 2), and because of the refraction / reflections, the 3d depth of field and motion blur, plus the high number of polygons, we reached the longest rendering times ever recorded in the company !

The swimming pool was done completely in 3d, using underwater references and textures taken on location. Some shots in the commercial required underwater shooting, so we built an underwater dolly rig that was operated directly by the divers of GEARHEAD. With a second unit camera we were able to shoot water footage, shot using a fish tank on black background, for reference or compositing elements.

(here a picture of the underwater rig, and me, doing some tracking markers survey)

To have a nice looking water, we needed perfect reflections. The job required a very high definition HDR environment that I shot using my custom tripod head and my Nikon D70s.
As I needed only the upper part of the scene, I took 9 shots tilted up at 8 exposures each with a Sigma 10mm lens. Julien and I wrote a script that controls the camera and takes all the dynamic range by itself ! That way we didn't have to manipulate the camera between takes, significantly reducing the possibility of shaking.

Although we had a very short time to make the commercial - 3 weeks 1/2 - the concept and the important technical challenges made it fun to create.

This is the making of the commercial (music from Susumu Yokota) :