Our POV continues ascending until we rise through the building's skylight and find ourselves aloft. The speed of our ascent quickens, and we see the land recede. Sun glints off the water surrounding the airport, and clouds float by below. Suddenly the arc of our movement changes viscerally as we're pulled in through the window of a jetliner. The camera continues pulling back more slowly now, making its way down the aisle among passengers before exiting another window. We see the plane fly away as we rise even higher, finally arriving at a communications satellite (X-shaped of course) that resolves into the Cingular logo.
Making this appear to be one seamless camera move required careful choreography of both the photographed and computer-generated images that are blended together in this spot.
"We were brought in during the bidding stage, and we prevized the spot in CG from beginning to end," reports Digital Domain Visual Effects Supervisor Eric Barba. DD used LightWave to previz not only the CG portions of the shot, but also to determine the pacing of the live action that director Erick Ifergan would later shoot. "Erick had a good sense of what he wanted the camerawork to be," notes Barba. "But the changes in scale are so dramatic that it was challenging to make the camera move from the macro-photography of the shoe to the view from low earth orbit. And the changes in speed were also a challenge. We start out slowly and then we're whisked off to our next vantage point. From the point where we leave the airport until we enter the airplane, we're moving at what we called 'ludicrous speed.' The previz helped Erick plan the live action shoot and get the timings down for the hookups to our CG."
Ifergan filmed his actors on a set that contained only the baggage-claim carousel. Because the camera had to zoom out so far, there was no stage big enough to accommodate a more extensive set. DD would have to create set extensions in CG to complete the rest of the scene. To show people on the upper levels of the airline terminal as the camera pulls out, Barba's team shot people against a green screen at different heights and angles. "While we didn't shoot these passes with motion control," Barba says, "we used them like motion control elements because we put them all back together into one CG move. There is a lot of animated camerawork in this spot, since it is essentially an animated zoom. The live action portion in the airport terminal was a bunch of pieces that were hooked together."
The only other live action shoot done for this spot was the portion inside the plane on a set with a green-screen rig outside the windows. Barba's team placed tracking markers outside the windows and then the camera move was tracked in DD's computers using the studio's Academy-honored software TRACK.
Meanwhile, the CG team was busy creating both 3D- and 2D-CG elements. Along with the 3D-CG planes, buildings, and airport set extensions created in LightWave, DD used Maya to animate digital extras that populated the airline terminal. Houdini was also used to animate the clouds. One of the most daunting CG challenges actually turned out to be the 2D matte paintings showing the airport from the air, which were done in Adobe Photoshop.
"When the camera moves out from the airport, we're roughly on a 10 mm lens that animates into an 18 mm lens as we get up to the airplane," Barba explains. "To make that work, we had to use very large matte paintings - about ten 6K matte paintings that we had to tile together because the field of view was so large. Both of our painters had worked on The Time Machine film, but the matte paintings for this spot were actually larger than those in that film."
To complete the illusion of the airport viewed from above, the 3D-CG models of the buildings and planes were then nested into these matte paintings using DD's compositing software NUKE. Recently honored by the Academy with a Sci-Tech award, NUKE's creators have expanded the software with a full 3D camera system, and Barba notes that "no matter what software package we're animating in, we can export that camera directly into NUKE. That immediately gives us hookups as far as how we can put things together. Our compositors, who did the bulk of the 3D pieces and the matte painting hookups, worked in NUKE. Then the live action hookups were done in Flame."
While the end result is undeniably choreographed, Barba notes, "We tried to restrain our camera to the 'real world' as much as possible. With CG you already have a tough sell, so you have to make your camerawork that much more real. If you add an unrealistic camera move, it's going to give away the gag."
Credit Roll
Director: Erick Ifergan Creative Directors: Rich Wakefield, Bill Pauls/ BBDO/Atlanta Producer: Gerard Cantor/Believe Media Director of Photography: Toby Irwin For Digital Domain-Visual Effects Supervisor: Eric Barba CG Supervisor: Vernon Wilbert Compositing Supervisor: David Stern CG Animation - John Allardice, Terry Naas, Dan Weber, Bryan Whitaker Flame Compositor: Alan Latteri NUKE Compositors: Brian Begun, Jessica Harris, Brandon McNaughton Integration: Martin Clark, Paul Hopkins, Ross MacKenzie Matte Painters: Peter Baustaedter, Daveed Schwartz
