A Russian fishing trawler trudges through a foggy, mill-pond flat sea. A work-stained fisherman on a break takes a last swig of his drink and reflexively crushes the can and hurls it into the sea. He turns and starts to walk away when the can flies back out of the water, hitting him. He peers into a now roiling ocean, and sees mysterious objects glittering and moving beneath the surface.
The first scene of SEA, the new Smirnoff spot created by J Walter Thompson and directed by Daniel Kleinman, sets the tone perfectly for this spot reminiscent of CLOSE ENCOUNTERS-era Spielberg. SEA presents the viewer with a series of brief shots and tableaux both bizarre and awe-inspiring, with post-production created by Framestore CFC.
To the accompaniment of a brooding Kalinka-esque soundtrack, we move from the trawler to the sight of countless coins unearthing themselves from the seabed, flying out of the water and showering down onto beaches. As the scale of the events we are witnessing notches up, we see aircraft lifting themselves out of the water, joined by shipping containers and ancient monumental statuary, all of them spinning into the sky and crashing into shoreline heaps of deep-sea detritus. As the spot reaches its climax, enormous sea vessels -- including a gigantic modern battleship -- are ejected from the sea. The camera then pans across and traverses a newly cleansed, unbelievably crystalline ocean and the words "Extraordinary Purification" appear over the shot
With Kleinman in the director's seat, his long time Framestore CFC associate, William Bartlett, was the natural choice for vfx supervisor on SEA. The 3D team, led by CG supervisor Dan Seddon, had already started work on the numerous models that would be needed, including the battleship, Spitfires, a Lancaster bomber, Spanish galleons, a Viking longship and other bits and pieces. "Because a lot of the animation was basically static objects spinning around," Bartlett said, "For a lot of it we set up the cameras in Flame, prevised lots of things in there and then exported the set-up to 3D. This was done on even very complex shots, such as the end one, where we go past the cliff and then dive under water to where the bottle lies. For that one we had a live-action plate of the cliff, which we tracked. We then made a rough model and re-projected the live-action footage onto that in order to change the camera move. We made all the bits for the undersea section out of helicopter footage taken over beaches at low tide projected onto a rocky surface. We rendered all that and gave it to 3D in the set-up, so that they knew where the sea was supposed to be. They then created the sea surface through which our stuff could be refracted, as well as adding any 3D model elements such as the battleship. This was then put back into Flame, where I reassembled it. It was a very complicated process, but the result is beautifully clean and -- funnily enough -- quite simple looking."
Seddon added, "We restored the Houdini-based system that was used on SUPERMAN [RETURNS] to do the sea. Initially thinking we'd just pick it up and run with it. But it was quite a complex system -- and a little unwieldy for the quick turnaround our shots demanded. So we ended up using their methodology, but in a simplified form involving tools sourced off the Internet to give us the waves...
"It was an interesting job for 3D, because it was a mixture of everything: traditional vfx stuff -- sea, splashes, large volumes of stuff raining out of the air; a strong lighting component; modeling; and a little animation. One of the things I liked most about SEA is that it was a real opportunity for team members to develop the broad skill base that helps makes us such an industry powerhouse."
Other Framestore CFC credits include: * TDs: David Mellor, Guillaume Fradin, Alex Doyle, Michelle Fabbro, Daniel Stern* Modeling: Kate Hood, Mary Swinnerton.* Animator: Dale Newton* Junior TD: Paul Jones, Jabed Khan* Matte Painters: Paul Chandler, Sam Osborne* Inferno Artists: William Bartlett, Marcelo Pasquillino* Roto Artists: Savneet Nagi, Laura Ingram* Telecine Colorist: Matt Turner* VFX Producer: Scott Griffin
Bill Desowitz, former editor of VFXWorld, is currently the Crafts Editor of IndieWire.
