Stylish Time-Lapse

Tree and house devolve in a multi-layered, time-lapse sequenceinvolving a combination of live-action and CG images in Playstationspot.

A :30 promoting the Sony Playstation 2 game Dark Cloud 2plays with traditional notions of time-lapse photography. Thecommercial, directed by Stu Maschwitz of The Orphanage, Los Angeles/SanFrancisco, for agency TBWA\Chiat\Day (executive producer Paul Grimshaw,producer Scott Kaplan), features a “hero tree” thatdevolves back to a seedling over 150 years, as elements surrounding it— most prominently, a house that is crushed by the tree at thestart of the piece — come and go in various forms as the spotplays backward, time-lapse style.

What made the approach unique was the sheer number of elements— “hundreds of layers, a mind-bender of a comp,”according to Maschwitz — from different sources, including alive-action shoot, a miniature shoot, still photography, and dozens ofCG pieces.

Among the many challenges was the lighting. Because the spot showsdifferent time periods almost every frame, the lighting was notsupposed to be consistent.

“We did all the 3D work inside Maya, so we utilized some ofits new fluid dynamic capabilities for the sky, and Mental Ray was ourrenderer, allowing us to do image-based lighting for the vehicles andother 3D props,” says Maschwitz. “That was an aggressivedecision, because it was render intensive, but it allowed us to ensureperfect integration of the lighting. The clouds in the sky drove thecolor correction, and in turn, the scene itself provided lighting forthe CG elements.”

The Orphanage also utilized “splatter” CG textures toadd life to surfaces. Those textures came from an image library calledWater Damage, sold by DV Garage, San Francisco. “We used particlesystems to splatter those textures on the driveway, and then ran theparticles in reverse to make them fade in, rather than fading off ordisappearing as they would normally do,” says Maschwitz.

The hero tree's reverse growth was created using an applicationcalled X-Frog, from Germany's Green Works. The Orphanage used AdobeAfter Effects to composite the various elements.