Case Study: Sleepyhead “Sanctuary” I
Posted: October 27th, 2009 |
We thought it would be interesting to walk you through the various stages of creating an animated TV commercial, to give you an idea of what’s involved. We have chosen to look at the production cycle of a recent 30″ spot for Sleepyhead Beds, partly because we’re rather pleased with how it came out, but mainly because it incorporated a wide range of 2D and 3D techniques, as well as some live-action components and gives a good overview of a typical DMG production. So let’s get started…
A little about the brand
Sleepyhead is an iconic New Zealand manufacturing brand that had done no significant brand work for many years. It has developed a new brand platform of Escapism – producing beds of such quality that they become your special place - away from the world where you can rejuvenate. The was also a desire to create a more feminine and modern look to the brand. The brand relaunch (in the new year) coincides with a development of their new top end Sanctuary bed range, made of the finest materials and employing the unique, patented Sensorzone bed technology. The script is all about this bed’s extreme comfort levels having the ability to take you to your special place and rejuvenate.
Script & Storyboard
The “sanctuary” script was written by Andy Mitchel at Auckland advertising agency Magnet, and some initial design ideas and style references were provided by Art Director Lorenz Perry of Splinter Group. Our first task at DMG was to create some more detailed sample frames in Photoshop to show the clients the style and graphic look we wanted to achieve in the ad. At the same time we drew up a detailed pencil storyboard, mapping out the action and narrative of the piece. This is as much for our benefit as it is for the clients, and formed the template to which we adhered throughout the rest of the production precess.
A section of our pencil storyboard showing framing and camera moves.
Shoot
To shoot the live action components of the commercial, we brought in our good friends from Automatic Films, Director and Cinematographer Siggi Spath and producer Declan Cahill. We set up in a local studio and shot a series of static and tracking shots of model Vanessa Wilkinson over the course of a morning – probably the most relaxing assignment she’s ever had. For anyone who doesn’t know, the blue screen behind the bed allows us to remove the background later. The bits of tape on the background are tracking marks to help us match-move the shot. (More about that later).
Sceenes from the studio shoot, and the coresponding frames from the storyboard.
Animatic & Blocking Out
After shooting, the first thing we did was record a guide audio track of the ad’s voice-over and using this as a timing guide, edited our storyboard panels together to create an animatic. This is a vital and often overlooked part of the process. It allows us to get a clear idea about the pace and rhythm of the piece. In this case, it became quickly apparent that the script was over long, and the decision was made to cut several scenes to avoid crowding the narrative, and maintain the dreamy, sleepy pace that we wanted to achieve.
An early 3D sceene blocking out key moments in the script.
The next stage was to recreate the journey described in the storyboard in true 3D space. The script called for the camera to follow a Fantail (New Zealand bird) as it flies through a dream landscape, arriving at our sleeping woman. We set up a scene in Cinema 4D, using simple geometry to approximate the positions of key elements within the landscape – the trees, the waterfall, the lakes and river, the bridge and the mountains etc.We then created a spline path for the camera to follow from beginning to end, and by a process of trial and error, adjusted the scale and position of the various elements until the framing and timing matched that in the animatic. This process of roughing out the animation is Blocking In and sounds easy enough, but it took us several days to perfect the move, and have our 3D camera blend seamlessly with the real camera move we had filmed in the studio. Which brings us to…
Match-Moving
Tracking or match-moving is the process of using software to analyse a piece of footage, and using complex algorithms – deduce the position and movement of the camera that captured the shot. Much has been written about the black art of match-moving, but in our experience it either works or it doesn’t. Thankfully, on this occasion it did. Once the software has completed its analysis, you can export the camera data in a variety of common 3D formats. In our case we used the Lightwave format, which Cinema 4D understands.
Waterfall
Some of the various particle passes which went to make up the waterfall.
Doing a waterfall never sounded that easy, and we kicked around a few ideas about how we might do it, including the patented Star Wars method of filming pouring salt. Because we weren’t aiming for photo-realism here, we opted to go for using a 3D particle system. Basically, an emitter creates particles, they are affected by wind and gravity. They fall and collide with geometry (the rocks and ground) and spawn more particles to create the splashes. The whole thing is controlled by a script we set up within the 3D program. It took a while to get it right (as it always does when particles are involved) but we eventually arrived at something that looked pretty good. The particles were rendered with a huge amount of motion-blur to create the smearing effect before compositing into the scene.
One of the several scripts controlling the behaviour of the waterfall.
