Recreating a Classic

Smoke & Mirrors New York used Autodesk Flame, Smoke, Softimage, and Maya to recreate the classic Beatles Abbey Road album cover for two spots for the videogame The Beatles: Rock Band.

The visual effects team for Smoke & Mirrors New York (SMNY) recreated the classic Beatles Abbey Road album cover and then brought that moment to life for 30-second and 60-second spots promoting the MTV videogame The Beatles: Rock Band.

While it looks as if this fantasy were captured on film, the reality is that
SMNY—the New York studios of famed visual effects house Smoke & Mirrors in the UK—created this illusion using Autodesk Flame visual effects and compositing software, Autodesk Smoke software for editing, and Autodesk Softimage and Maya software for 3D animation. The team's Autodesk pipelines have further expanded with the addition of Autodesk Flare software.

Both of the Beatles: Rock Band spots recreate the moment the Beatles—John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr—walk single-file across the striped crosswalk of London's Abbey Road. Cut to the song "Come Together" from Abbey Road, the spots show the Beatles stopping in the middle of the street and beginning to interact with people who show up. The crowd, which now stretches up the sidewalk and beyond, crosses the road behind the Beatles to the music's beat. At the end, the steady stream of people speeds up into streaks of light that resolve into the tag promoting the game.

The SMNY creative team—including Senior Flame artist Phil Akka; CD Sean Broughton; Chief Engineer Simon Hester; and Flame Artists Stephanie Isaacson and Sam Caine—spent an intense five weeks developing, compositing and finishing the ads, the longer of which had more shots but the same storyline.

This project marks the first time Flare was ever used on set during a shoot. Flare software was loaded onto an HP laptop with AJA Video Systems I/O and graphics boards and used to evaluate each take to determine if the effects they wanted to create would work.

Because there was no video shot for the album cover, the visual effects team had to recreate the moment piece by piece, using body doubles, existing archival footage of the actual Beatles, and visual effects.

Since there was no film or video shot when the historic Abbey Road photo was taken, SMNY had to create its full-motion elements from scratch. The plan was to have four body doubles—dressed identically to the Abbey Road Beatles—walk like the Beatles did on the cover photo.

A bluescreen set was built on the Universal lot in Los Angeles, featuring a partial view of Abbey Road including the striped crosswalk, dotted-lined street, a taxi, and some trees. SMNY artists then did head reps, placing the heads of the Beatles—taken from 16mm archival film—onto the body doubles' bodies and tracking the camera moves.

Since the 16mm film had been shot at different points in the Beatles' careers, it was difficult to find usable shots where they looked the way they did on the cover, so intensive visual effects were needed to make the effects work.

For example, there was no archive footage available of Harrison and Lennon sporting the same shoulder-length hair, heavy beards, and mustaches as on the cover. There was also no archive footage available of McCartney with the same clean-shaven, short hairstyle from the cover.

"This meant using heavy camera tracking, distortion, rotoscoping, and virtually every Flame tool we had to do the head reps, and take mustaches, beards, and extra hair and graft them onto the Beatles' heads. We also had to consider subtle facial muscle movements before we added the hair," SMNY says. "The illusion had to be totally credible because viewers would know if it rang true or not."

Among the archival shots of Starr was one where he was smoking a cigarette with big plumes of smoke wafting around his face and hair, so the cigarette and smoke needed to be painted out. An archival shot of Harrison showed him holding a guitar such that the handle partially obscured his face. The guitar arm needed to be removed so his hair, mustache, and beard could be grafted on, and then a CG Rock Band guitar, created in Autodesk Softimage, was put in place of the original guitar. In the spot, a young girl hands her guitar over to Harrison to make sense of the guitar in his shot.

The Abbey Road background also presented creative and technical challenges. First, the Universal set wasn't wide enough, so it had to be stretched about 30 percent in Flame to match the scale of the road on the cover. Also, the film plates shot of present day Abbey Road had defects such as scaffolding on buildings that needed to be removed.

In this shot of George Harrison, his hair and beard were grafted on and his actual guitar was replaced with a CG Rock Band guitar.

Among the elements keyed into the bluescreen background were 3D CG buildings, which were created using Softimage. Photographed images of the actual buildings on Abbey Road were then projected onto the 3D buildings using Flame. The illusion was finished in Flame by adding matte paintings, moving CG cars and trees. The archival film required much digital restoration, and all elements and composites had to be color-graded and lit to match the look and feel of the cover photo.

"Flare was indispensable on set because there was no other practical or effective way of ensuring that the body doubles' movements would line up precisely with the archival shots we planned to use," Isaacson says.

On the set, the output of the 35mm camera's video tap was fed into Apple Final Cut Pro on a MacBook, and then exported as uncompressed QuickTime files into the laptop with Flare software.

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"I then comped the archive footage on top of each take as it was shot to make sure we got a least one good take where the body double moved in a close enough way to the Beatles' movement in the archive footage so we could be certain we could line up the elements," Isaacson says.

"The deciding factor for us in buying the Flare systems was the sheer volume of work we're doing these days," says Mark Wildig, chief technical officer of Smoke & Mirrors London. "We often have more than one person on a job, and that used to mean our heavyweight machines were always tied up. With Flare, we can free up our Flame systems to take on other work."

"Flame was extremely beneficial to this project because it contains all the tools we need to create and composite visual-effects-intensive spots and finesse and finish them in one box," says Simon Hester, head engineer at SMNY.

"Bringing The Beatles' Abbey Road album cover to life was one of the trickiest, most challenging things I've ever done to be honest," SMNY says. "It would have been impossible to do these visual effects without Flare. This wasn't something you could do with just a mix and overlay, or simple composites on a Mac. It wasn't something you could ask the video assist to deal with since they have their own jobs to do. And we ultimately had to make the decisions about the takes because we'd be the ones doing the effects work."

"Flare impressed everyone that witnessed how it brought Flame capabilities to the set," Hester says. "Back in the studio, it works seamlessly with our Flames and the other Autodesk systems in our powerful, efficient pipeline. There was no way we could have achieved what we needed to on this project without Flare."