Barclays "Change"

Director: Dante Ariola
Agency: BBH
Production: MJZ
Client: Barclays

I couldn’t believe my luck when we got the job, and my bad luck when I didn’t make it to the shoot and witness a masterclass in acting from two legends of cinema, and no, I am not the kind of guy that has idols or anything like that, but it would have been exceptional to see this in my life.

Tools

Helping Hand

Money Tree

The job involved substituting all the leaves on the trees for different currency notes, from British pounds to Japanese yen, and populating trees with them.

Technically, we learned trees have a lot of leaves, to the extent that our renders had to be heavily massaged to make them run through the render farm.

The technique I designed was based on particle instancing of different types of branches with different currencies, so the first thing was to build a library of possible variations, sizes and of course currencies.

Interestingly enough, when I started to count the number of leaves on those trees, I was blown away. We could manage to do all sorts of things like translucency, shadowing and global illumination with these numbers in Mental Ray, up to 30 million leaves per tree were necessary to get the correct feeling and we could easily put 20 trees in one pass.

The render times were slow, of course, but acceptable… less than 30 minutes a frame.

A truly amazing experience to be involved in a project with such actors as Donald Sutherland and Gary Oldman.