Levi's "Stampede"
A complex CG job, the kind of “obvious-yet-invisible” effects, in this case a mass of bisons in front of camera plus major city extensions.
Feb 06, 2003
2 min read
Director: Jorn Haagen
Agency: BBH NY
Production: Academy
Client: Levi's
This was probably one of the most important jobs at this time, where CGI takes centre stage amongst real animals, so the challenge was to populate the various streets with CGI bisons that would be side by side with real ones.
At this time, with the technology we have, this was a bit of a challenge but thanks to the previous experiences I have built, in particular FSM and HFSM combined with motion capture, this was a project perfectly tailored for me in the context of a team of experts.
I was dedicated to creating the crowd, but of course, we needed a certain level of manual control. I utilised a simple rig-based point cloud system to instance the bisons, which were particularly heavy due to the hair rendering with Mental Ray.
I populated the streets with up to 600 instances and carefully traced them so they would avoid contact with the real ones, leaving a layer of hand-animated hero bisons for the animation team to handle. In this way, we got all the benefits from large-scale crowds but perfect control on a shot-by-shot basis.
Unfortunately, smoke, debris and other atmospheric effects are not quite possible at the time, so we relied on compositing for it.
Such an amazing time working on this one!