Stitched Together

As the founder and live-action director at Kommitted Films, I was happy to continue my productive relationship with the Kaplan Thaler Group and Continental Airlines with Seamless, a :30 journey through New York, London, Shanghai, Buenos Aires, and Paris.

The new work for Continental has been sleek and well-designed, connecting planes with the high production values often associated with car spots. The brief for Seamless was a challenging development.

How do you walk a man through five cities in 14 seconds without taking your eyes off him? The current climate and budgetary constraints rule out a world tour shooting all the locations or an elaborate CG solution. And we only had three days in Buenos Aires.

In a word, the answer is preparation.

It sounds nasty, something an incredibly irritating science teacher might say, but it is a maddening truism that doing your homework pays. While researching the possible locations, wardrobes, set dressings, and more, the whole spot was previsualized in Autodesk Maya. The animation looks fairly basic, but it allows the spot to be paced out, lenses and variations of camera moves tried and refined. This helps to troubleshoot, hone the vision, and communicate to everyone what''s required.

What is required here is motion control. The MRMC Milo is a remarkable beast. At 7ft. tall, it often appears sentient running along up to 100ft. of track, performing powerful pirouettes to keep the movement of the camera head subtle and above all repeatable. The move prevized is a floaty track, following our traveler on a 27mm lens, wide enough to take in and read each location. Then we went down to Argentina for some serious scouting.

At least two locations needed to be shot on the same day, and the setup times meant that a good site survey of each place was essential. Once the locations were narrowed down, measured and extensively photographed, the images were uploaded to Microsoft Photosynth and the measurements sent to the pre-viz artist. Photosynth is a website that meshes image sets together to create a 3D scene. The scenes are based on a point cloud derived from the focal point of each picture. You can see spatial relationships and zoom though the images, which dynamically change resolutions. Using these scenes, the previz took a new direction, this time using location stills projected into more accurate virtual environments. Google Earth provided information about the light direction at different times of day.

With shooting due to start in three days, we were already looking at the spot with all the locations lined up. DP Amir Mokri, Asylum''s Visual Effects Supervisor Paul O''Shea, and I went through the ideal lighting scenarios and choreography. During the preproduction meeting, I laid out our plan. The detail, enthusiasm, and the quality of the presentation are infectious and breed confidence. The agency and client headed out for dinner very happy. Of course their call time wasn''t 3 a.m.

In the predawn of the first shoot day, O''Shea plotted and laid the tracks under work lights using scale diagrams exported from a bird''s eye camera in the Maya scene. The New York location was ready to shoot at dawn. Our 70ft. track was set across a road between two buildings in the financial district. The New York setup was the hero plate of the whole sequence—shooting it first would set the timing and position for all the other locations. I was very keen to get everything in camera before we broke it down into plates. The motion-control move was refined a little from the previz, and Art Director John Wildermuth handled the talent like a master. The first day involved a company move between locations, setting up the motion-control rig twice. Time was very tight, and everything needed to go smoothly.

By the time the motion-control track arrived at the second location after lunch, the track position was plotted out, and from it we triangulated the positions of the taxis, policemen, newsstands, etc. Things look easy if you don''t see the work going on under the surface. The day worked out well, the clients and agency were on board, and everything moved forward as planned.

While shooting the London location, there was general amusement over the chalkboard signs outside the pub. They read “Chips, Fish, and Reel Beer.” An Englishman asked for a rubber to correct them and an American gave him an eraser. The atmosphere on the set was good and the art department was able to respond to everyone''s comments.

The next shoot followed this pattern, and we left Buenos Aires confident. The spot was cut on Avid and conformed and finished on Autodesk Flame over a period of three weeks, with help from a matte painter and roto team. The motion-control lineup was critical, and there was a little trepidation it would match. Each scene was tracked in Flame, and the camera track became a virtual move once more—smoothed out and seamless.

The transitions between the cities were made using 100 to 150 surfaces laid over the scenes with 30 animating projectors deconstructing then building the incoming scene. The transitions were not overly preconceived. Instead, they developed fluidly as the matte paintings of the cities were built and integrated. The lineup of the background policeman and the journey of the taxi from yellow cab to black London cab to rickshaw and finally to a speeding French taxi all worked out.

Thorough planning and research take the stress levels down during shooting and give the creativity in the crew a chance. In a very busy shoot day, you need to make time to be able to react and improvise. The integration between the virtual and real world is becoming a smoother and more rewarding process that pays creative dividends throughout the job.

Founder/Director Nathan McGuinness launched production company Kommitted Films in 2005, and over a short time period has amassed nearly 50 projects. He is currently entertaining several feature film offers. At 35, Perth, Australia, native McGuinness is best known as the Academy Award-nominated co-founder/creative director of the VFX company Asylum. Growing up the son of a TV marketing executive, he developed an early taste for the medium.