Guinness 'Tipping Point'
A wonderful idea for one of the best brands in the world, executed in a fabulous way with some little help from post-production effects, not much though.
Oct 29, 2007
3 min read
Director: Nicolai Fuglsig
Agency: AMV/BBDO
Production: MJZ London
Client: Guinness
This commercial has been a long journey of a very talented little team trying their best to hold to the beauty of the plates, of course some stuff could not be done due to logistics of the whole operation, probably the most complex shoot i have ever seen and probably also one of the most demanding physically as we were 3200m high so even breathing was a problem, but after all, it has been one big great job i had the luck to work at.
An interesting question on such a challenge is how to bring those book and build this structure, if you imagine the weight of it you can easily see it is just not possible within such an small structure, for this we actually shoot a wireframe that helped the director frame the shoot, the editor assemble a very tight edit that didn’t need much changes and of course everybody had a very clear idea of what to do.
Approach
The books were actually done with Houdini, given that I did envision many changes down the road, as this is the nature of CG, you can change your mind anytime, isn’t it? Well, that is not really true as it may have huge implications but on a job like this, we did count for it, so the size of books, number of pages, animation positioning within the frame, the frame itself, the textures, the uvs were all generated procedurally with the help of a top Houdini artist that made our rig a reality.
And as you see here, we did integrate our CG books and structure with the live action plates, trying to mimic the lighting as much as possible with the help of HDR panoramas that were shot on a Canon 5D with a special tripod.
Another interesting fact is the page count; as you can see, there are an average of 300 pages per book, so we ended up with tens of thousands of pages. The render was with full motion blur and raytracing to get the very fine nuances of contact between pages, which was a major render… well, actually… I was shocked by how amazing Mantra was dealing with it and made me very happy, as I could now worry only about the animation rather than the rendering to the point that the back books were also rendered the same way, given that we needed the shadows to have pages and motion blur too for the back side of the rig.
And as you can see, the cars were real; we actually rigged the cars to be able to reset fast, but with just 4 takes, we did capture the shot as we were using 4 cameras at the same time. Quite an amazing day that was!
