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"Alienated" : "the state of being withdrawn or isolated from the objective world, as through indifference or disaffection."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

ISUZU DMAX S SERIES
With this job I had the opportunity to design futuristic architecture and motion graphics. The commercial was directed by Veera Sae Ueng, and on air in Thailand. A very interesting commercial with nice visuals.

Ad for DIGITAL MAGIC / ASIA IMAGE 2009
Julien Vanhoenacker and I had to design and shoot an ad for our company. I came up with this idea : "Next time I do it with Digital Magic". This is the CG / matte painting I did in 3dsmax / photoshop. Julien and I shot all the elements in the backyard of our friend company, Cinerent. We shot all the elements on green screen. That was fun.

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) :

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

CADILLAC - NEW CTS

A beautiful car running through an ice city, the fastest man on earth as the main talent (Liu Xiang), a kick ass director of photography plus world class directors from London.

Above : Early sketch design of the ice city

Below : Pictures of the final output : The first picture shows the car composited in the CG ice and the CG environment.
The second picture shows the car, shot static on white background in studio, running in the CG environment.

The shooting was done in Shanghai. It wasn't easy... Shot in a very big studio during three days - and almost three nights -.
There was a minimum of 50 persons on the set, due to Liu Xiang as the main talent. It was very hard to do the shooting in these conditions.

Most of the shots were shot with a static car. This way the lighting was easier to control. Later on, we had to track the car, erase the static wheels and replace them with CG rotating wheels. We also had to composite CG reflections moving on the surface of the car, to enhance the motion. Using compositing tricks and masks, we manage to completely blend the CG reflections with the car and get 32 bit reflections with all the dynamic range. This way we could get nice motion blur and depth of field.

Below : The DOP looking at the first shot of the 15s commercial (the car in the ice cube).

We did many designs, as at the beginning the director's idea was to have the car in a kind of icy cavern. The agency wasn't really going for this idea, and as the project went, the design progressively evolved to be a huge stylish titanium hangar. The main idea that kept going through the process of the commercial was "crystal sharp" or "diamond cut".

Below : Early designs of the cavern.

Even though this project was very hard and exhausting, I learn a lot with the contact of many talented people. The most interesting was to discover the DOP's techniques to light the car, that I'm now using as CG lighting technique.
The commercial as been on air during the 2008 Beijing Olympic games.

M150
M150 is an energy drink. This series of three commercials are based on the idea that with self confidence you can achieve anything.

This is one of the three commercials for M150 we had to do. I had to design and build an entire arena. That was a fun part. I had complete freedom on the design, the director just said "I want an arena !". I came up with this design after a few days. I decided to play with the shadows as a symbol of the inner fear inside each one of us.

Here a comparison between sketch design and final picture.

Everything was shot on green screen in studio. A big work of keying - rotoscoping and compositing was necessary. 3x45 seconds commercials were done in 2 months. This one here, The Arena, was done in less than a month (28 shots).

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 !

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 :