EVERYDAY HEROES, a recent :60 Budweiser spot from Waylon Ad in St. Louis, marked the first time that A52 has used Massive, the AI-driven animation system from Massive Software that is currently in V. 2.0.
Back in April, Anheuser-Busch announced its Heres to the Heroes cross-country tour, sending an eight-horse Clydesdale team from New York and a second from San Francisco, each accompanied by its own mobile television studio, to major cities along the routes to St. Louis, where both teams will meet on July 3.
The Everyday Heroes spot tells the story of the tour, crafted by the creative team from agency Waylon Ad and the projects director, Academy Award-winning cinematographer Bob Richardson of Tool of North America.
The projects creative called for a magical glimpse into the future to occur at the spots end, featuring a crowd of 15,000 celebrating the tours patriotic causes and the two Clydesdale teams coming together in St. Louis. To create that crowd, A52s 3D animator Craig Xray Halperin used Massive version 2.0 to generate a group of 10,000 animated people surging toward the Clydesdales. Using Massive allowed us to generate the crowds for these shots quickly and interactively, said Halperin, who learned to use the software over a period of weeks in support of this project. I showed the client placement and overall motion of the crowd in Massive and was able to instantly make adjustments based on their direction.
While Halperin was getting up-to-speed on Massive, A52s Patrick Murphy took the lead as on-set visual effects supervisor, and together with vfx producer Ron Cosentino, joined the production team for their two-day shoot in St. Louis, which wrapped some 20 days of location filming. The goals for A52s vfx team on location included ensuring that footage of the Clydesdales shot in St. Louis would allow the horse team to easily be composited into footage of San Franciscos Golden Gate Bridge, and also advising the director and his team on shooting the live-action elements of the end crowd scene to ensure they had what they needed to finish the spot.
While Richardson set up his long list of final shots in St. Louis, A52 helped to place 200 extras so that they could easily film what was needed for any closeup shots on the crowd. With A52 planning to use Massive to generate thousands upon thousands of CGI attendees to complete the scene, Richardson was able to move quickly through a long night of shooting. Bob was very receptive to our ideas on how to get the crowd plates to work, and he helped us get the shots that we needed to finish the spot, Murphy said.
Back in the studio, Murphy and his fellow vfx artists Kirk Balden, Tim Bird, Justin Blaustein, Ben Looram and Scott Johnson used Discreet Flame and Inferno systems from Autodesk to complete several scenes. The Clydesdales were composited into footage on the Golden Gate Bridge, and extensive work was also done to finalize the St. Louis celebration scenes.
For the wide shot showing the cityscape, the Arch and the riverfront, the vfx team turned a scene filmed during the day into night by taking a flat telecine pass and grading it down to get the feeling of nighttime, resulting in the city looking like it was out of power. From there, Murphy said, I painted lights into the windows of the city buildings by hand then tracked those in. For all the street lamps on the bridge leading into St. Louis, we tracked lighting street lights to each light, then we put pools of light all the whole way across the bridge. While the animated elements made up the crowd in the wide celebration shot at the end, for the tighter crowd shots, Murphy used Flame for 2D placement of crowd elements as well as some 2,000 animated people Halperin created using Massive. For the finishing touches, A52s team put stock footage fireworks in the end scenes, placed reflections in the water in front of the Arch and lit up the crowd.
West Hollywood-based visual effects and design company A52 (www.A52.com) creates award-winning imagery for the worlds most visually ambitious commercial and television projects. The companys work has been earned AICP Show recognition for six consecutive years along with recent Outstanding Commercial Emmy, Andy, BDA, Belding, Clio, British Design and Art Direction, International Monitor, International Automotive Advertising, London International Advertising, One Show and PROMAX awards.
Bill Desowitz, former editor of VFXWorld, is currently the Crafts Editor of IndieWire.
