ALIENATED.
Check out this short animation movie that Alejandro Garcia and I did as a personal project ! (click here for HD)

"Alienated" : "the state of being withdrawn or isolated from the objective world, as through indifference or disaffection."

BRIDGESTONE - ARMADILLO
For the new commercial for the new Ecopia Tire, I was asked to do an Armadillo and a CG Tire as the main characters. The commercial tells the story of an Armadillo who wants to play with a Tire, but can't keep up with the sharp curves and the bumpy road.

Click HERE to see the final video (opens in a new window).

PANDA - CADBURY GEMS SURPRISE
This TVC was done with the Indian director Vishal Mangalorkar, and was on air in India. In this TVC two Pandas are eating Cadbury Gems under a tree. They soon discover that the Gems ball are not only containing sweets but also include some Ben 10 plastic figures. This is probably the most difficult commercial I have done so far, as the artistic and technical requirements were so high !

The commercial was shot in a natural park in Khao Yai, Thailand, using a RED camera. 4 actors were playing the pandas. The heat in the costumes was so high that the actors had to be switched at the end of every shot.


Building the head of the pandas was quite difficult as there was very little reference on the internet or books. The big amount of hairs on the face made it difficult to find the exact shape of the head and skin under the hairs. At the end, the modeling was based on white polar bears - hairs are less puffy - (even if the panda isn't classified as a bear but as a family of raccoon) and skeleton references of pandas.

The director wanted the pandas to look very dumb. We went through many pre-approves with the director to make sure we found a correct look that pleased us both. Once the commercial was shot and we got the fullgrade, we had to do further adjustments on the hairs style as we had to match the costume on the footage.

The Pandas were rendered with 3d Studio Max using the default Scanline Renderer. No GI was used, just a huge amount of light projecting soft shadows. The compositing was done with After Effects. The animation was done by Alejandro Garcia.

During the shooting I took a series of HDRI Data that was used to create both the lighting and reflections on the hairs. The pictures were taken with the custom tripod head that was build for previous projects.

The pandas had to play with Ben 10 Characters that came out of the Gems Balls. The models were based on the real toys but the modeling had to be refined because the scale was much bigger and therefore we could see more details. The rendering was done with Vray. At Digital Magic we recently made the acquisition of Vray RT which was of great help while doing the shading of the Ben 10.

The models were then tracked over dummy models. The dummy models were built with foam and painted in blue to be keyed and remove easily.

Here is the making of the commercial showing the different technics involved in its creation :

FROG - POLE VAULTING
The new commercial for NTT Data. This time the frog is pole vaulting. The challenge in this commercial was to keep the animation as close to reality as possible. We shot references for animation with one of the best pole vaulter of south-east Asia. The references were shot with a Phantom HD at 1000 fps.
The animation was difficult because the limbs of the frog are much shorter/longer than those of a human. It was hard to keep the correct key poses done by the human reference. With hard work and perseverance, Alejandro Garcia (Senior Animator) eventually managed to find a good compromise in the animation that pleased our clients.

This project was also a good opportunity to test the new customized HDR rotating head we built here at DM. It is composed of a custom design tripod head, a nikon d90 and a script, written by Julien Vanhoenacker, that automaticaly sets up the exposures and fire the shutter. What came out was a full 360°x180° picture that I could use to light up the scene as well as getting the correct reflections. (picture above: I cut out the top and bottom of the picture to save up space).

MONEY PARTNERS - PENGUINS
This commercial was done for Money Partners, Japan. The shooting took place close to time square, NYC.

The main difficulty of this project was to do seven penguins singing together. The modeling and the animation were done by Alejandro Garcia, and the rendering and the fur setup by myself. Pichaya Popanyasak also helped on rendering the still frames for the print campaign.

This commercial is part of a big campaign. You can check the rest of it here : http://www.moneypartners.co.jp/penguins/

POCARI SWEAT
Mr woody feels dehydrated ! This is definitely the most exciting, creative, interesting and potentially award winning job I've ever done :-)
Directed by the international renowned director Bo Krabbe, bringing his own never-seen-before style supported by the creative mind of Dentsu, the Japanese/Indonesian agency.
The animation was done by Alexandro Garcia. The design, modeling/texturing tracking and compositing was done by myself.

Here is a portrait of the Pocari Man dressed in one of the three suits we had to design.

The woodpecker in the commercial symbolizes the headache of the Pocari Man. The feathers were done using a scattering system and some of them placed manually. The soft look of the feathers was achieved using a translucent material and alpha maps. It was very important for us to come up with a unique design. The woodpecker also had to look nasty and mean.

You have to see it moving, here are all the spots we did (queued up in one single video) :



Links :
Republic of Bo Krabbe
Dentsu

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) :

CLIVE BARKER'S BOOK OF BLOOD

During the first half of 2008, I had the great opportunity to be the VFX Supervisor of all the 3d scenes of "Clive Barker's Book of Blood".

The "Book of Blood" is the latest movie from Clive Barker, this time directed by John Harrison. The horror story features a young college student who appears to be channeling messages from the dead.

I worked on this movie with a small team of 5 persons including myself. Julien Vanhoenacker and alejandro Garcia were doing the blood fountain, and Yves D'incau, Pichaya Popanyasak and myself were doing the dragonflies sequences and the clamp on the mouth. The CG process took a little less than two months.

Here is the VFX breakdown :

THE BODY
A horror movie filled with visual effects and special effects. The story of a double personality troubled person. For this feature film we did more than 15 minutes of visual effects, including a 2 minutes full CG shot. Good fun.


Here is an sample of the mesh I built for the "Skinless" shot. I took several pictures of the talent, to match his morphology, then modified the mesh so it looks like a skinless model. I created a displacement map using Zbrush and then enhanced it in Photoshop.

Check the CG trailer we did for the Awards :



In february 2008, we won the oscar at Suphannahong 17th Oscar Ceremony, for the best Visual Effects of the year.

IMDB "BODY#19" entry : click here
IMDB "Suphannahong" 17th Oscar ceremony : click here

SHERA - SHAKESPEAREAN GECKO
Not changing your ceiling could become a big story ! That's the idea we had to picture in this commercial ! To do so, the two CG characters take the spectator through an incredible Shakespearean love story.

Geckos are very popular in Thailand, but still some people can easily be afraid of them. Animating the geckos, and trying to give them this cute and attaching look was quite a challenge. We had long discussions with the director about the design and the final look of the gecko : "should we go for complete realistic look, or should we go for cartoon ? ". We finally came up with this hybrid style between realism, cartoon animation and modeling.

Here an example of a first linetest (left). It was definitely a wrong direction and and we decided with the director to go for a much cuter look (right) :

Another texture test. Here a comparison Male/Female. They both needed to have a specific animation and shader, as we needed to clearly be able to differentiate them. Later on the modeling was revised for the male, and the textures were changed, as the director thought the dark spots on the back look scary.

Check out the final shots in the video embedded below !

An interesting project which received the Silver Lion Award at Cannes Festival in July 2007 !

BBQ PLAZA
The meat in this restaurant turns you into a real lion. This was again a very funny job to do.
There was plenty of different small jobs to be done, like enlarging the mouth of the talents, extend their teeth, and make one of them turn into a lion.

I morphed two faces together. The actor's face was modeled on computer, using photograph references taken on set. Then, this mesh was morphed into a lion. Hairs and saliva were then added. I built a special rig for the mouth and the tongue, to allow it to be scaled and to be deformed as a real lion's tongue.


Unfortunately the commercial was never displayed in Thailand, it didn't pass the censorship. It was on air in China though.

SYSTEMA - DRAGON
A mouthwash which doesn't burn your mouth, here compared to other products.

Doing the fire effect wasn't an easy thing. The final output is a mix of many techniques : element simulation, compositing with elements shot on set, and shading work.

GIRLY BERRY - MUSIC VIDEO
This Music video was a big piece of work. We had to build and composite a full CG background on 180 shots within 10 days ! Luckily we had a week to prepare some models before the CG creation.
Because the censors wouldn't allow to show the singers naked, I was in charge of modeling the 4 girls in sexy poses, to be displayed as statues. A clever way to bypass the censors.

Everything, from the ground to the sky was shot on green screen. A good pipeline for keying/masking was necessary.
Here is another model, displayed in the museum (which isn't one of the singers)

CHANG - HELP
Chang is a mosquito repelant brand in Thailand. This is one of the first jobs I've done when i got in Bangkok. A good fun, and a good oportunity to increase my skills in setup and rigging.

FIN D'ETE
Fin d'ete (end of summer), is a short movie that I did in 2005 with two other students (Patrick Harboun and Ronan Le Fur) when we were doing our studies at SUPINFOCOM.
I strongly recommend to check the official website, as it contains a lot more about the background of the movie (sketches, animatic, making of, movie high res)

• "Fin d'ete" Official website : www.findete.com
• Patrick Harboun : http://www.twilit.tk/
  
• Ronan Le Fur : roboronan.bzh.bz
  

In an abandonned city, a woman decides to stay.
The CG creation of the movie took six months, but the all process, including script, sketch design, storyboard and animatic took a year.

The short movie :