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"Alienated" : "the state of being withdrawn or isolated from the objective world, as through indifference or disaffection."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

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.

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

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).

JOHNNIE WALKER
Bangkok under snow.
This is one of the matte painting that I had to do for this commercial. It is not in the final of the commercial, because of religious censor problems. You can check the final below.
Here is the original picture :