Barclaycard 'Waterslide'
A tremendously success of the journey of a man through a day in life as every single kind in this planet has dreamt a few times.
May 28, 2009
3 min read
Director: Peter Thwaites
Agency: BBH
Production: Gorgeous
Client: Barclaycard
A challenging job that was put together by a superb team of artists, and although my role was not very big, I feel proud of it and the contribution I made to the job in the design stages and initial supervision, along with some lighting for some shots.
As you can imagine, a huge amount of work was put into the reconstruction of buildings so we could cast shadows onto them, integrate them better by using that geometry textured with the actual plates to bounce light to the tubes.
And although we tried to get as much in camera as possible the reality is that it was impossible to hang a tube of this size so high without killing the actor and a few bystanders by the way so we devised a two side shoot where we would photograph the city and then go to a water park to try to mimick those shots, once we try to edit them certain angles would not work so we accommodated a third photography day of the city but this time knowing exactly how the shot should be.
The design of the tube was locked from day one, but the reality is that the transparent bits added a lot of dimension to the event, so we had to start working on extra tube blocks that could show what was going on inside, along with water and a human being inside riding the tube.
And the water, which is actually a geometry being deformed by a CG character moving down the tube.
Funny enough, we spent a lot of time coming up with a way to “design” the shots, so a lot of research time went into designing a tool for Houdini to run a curve fitting algorithm that could ease the difficult task of building the tube for each shot.
This of course didn’t work exactly as we wanted so with the lesson learned a different more hand made approach was designed in XSI to be able to easily swap and change the layout of the tube so we could change lenghts, rotations and what not, this of course would have an impact on the next tubes of the segment but it was easy to compensate and swap things around so layout became fun thanks to Andy Nicholas skills.
And finally, the elements that hold the tubes were another very difficult challenge that we tried to automate, but found out the hard way that it was easier once the layout was signed off on, to then set them up correctly on a per-shot basis.
