Camille Mandigo of Texas Creative and Chris O’Connell of The O’Connell Communications Group contacted us recently to produce a television campaign for Hill Country State Bank (HCSB) in Kerrville, TX. Executive producer O’Connell explained that “the bank’s (HCSB) old commercials although popular, were in need of a new look. Something new and fresh.” Geomedia’s goal was to revamp their television presence while keeping true to the previous spots.

We were handed creative storyboards that included two :30 commercials and four :15 commercials. The :30 commercials featured life-style vignettes with the actual bank officers. The :15 commercials were more “abstract” concepts. They were boarded as single lock-down shots that portrayed HCSB’s relationships with their customers using local iconic imagery. These shots needed to be personal to the bank yet designed to keep the television viewers “dialed-in.”

The HCSB creative called for a “film-look.” so we bid the project for 35mm or 16mm film production, as well as an HD package incorporating 35mm film lenses to capture a more filmic, shallow depth of focus. The large format “cine-style” HD camera is more expensive to use than most comparable film packages but offers a net savings in post-production with no film transfer, printing, or shipping costs.

The HCSB client chose the HD “cine-style” turnkey production.

Our DP/production director Zach Nasits phoned our buddies at Gear in Austin, TX to order the Varicam camera package outfitted with 35mm film lenses. As an option, Kirk Miles, the camera technician at Gear, offered us the RED ONE camera for the production and mentioned that it would cost about the same as the HD package would with an add-on lens adapter and 35mm lenses.

In the summer of 2007, Zach had worked as a 1st assistant cameraman with the RED camera on a test shoot for Robert Rodruigez at Troublemaker films. Jim Jannard, the founder of Oakley and inventor of the RED, had brought down two prototype RED cameras: “Boris” and “Natasha” for Rodruigez to investigate. Zach mentioned that prior to that the only other people who’d tested the camera before Rodruiguez were Steven Soderbergh and Peter Jackson. Both would go on to shoot features with the new camera, with Soderbergh receiving accolades at Cannes for his films “The Argentine” and “Guerrilla”

With a RED on order for months now, we had been waiting for the perfect opportunity for a first production with this revolutionary format. Many early adopters were posting positive reviews on the RED’s performance in the field but working with the 4K format in post would present new challenges. We agreed that shooting 4K would be an attractive option for the HCSB production. We proceeded to work out the post workflows and integrate new hardware and software into the pipeline.

Zach and I headed up to our Austin offices and performed tests at Gear offices, investigating the RED camera’s latitude, formats, frames per second, ASA’s, depth-of-field, and pure “user-friendliness” before sending the RAW footage back to Geomedia’s main facility in San Antonio, where we would push the 4K files through post-production and test finished output.

Testing proved extremely successful… It was time for Geomedia to paint HCSB’s television campaign RED!

“It was handled a lot like a film job” said production coordinator Murray Breit. “We synced sound by clapping slates. Zach metered light just like we were using film… We sent the footage through a digital in-house 4K tele-cine process and everything looked amazing! We were able to do everything, start to finish, right here. Breit added “The process we developed for editing, color grading, conform and finishing worked perfectly… Most importantly the project came in on time and on budget and the client was very impressed with the quality of their new spots.”

Geomedia utilized the RED camera on location the day after the HCSB shoot for a commercial for Fuse Gym based in San Diego, CA. The RED camera package consisted of Zeiss Super Speeds, an Angenieux 10:1 zoom lens with full film camera support. Zach captured 4K at 500 (ASA) to have more latitude into the high-lights and rated the camera at 160 ASA as a result of their camera tests.

He explains the differences between each concept and clients needs, “It’s great that we had consecutive shoot days and got to capture two completely different looks with this camera… HCSB was more conventional beauty shots while Fuse was way more gritty.. shooting a 6 stops ratio.”

With a set of Super-Speeds on the way and a full slate of RED shoots on the books, we are more anxious than ever for “our” RED ONE #2357 to arrive at our door! We have not decided on any names for “her” yet!!

Geomedia recently attended the 2008 San Antonio Advertising Federation “Totally Awesome” awards presentation and proudly walked away with a small collection of Addys. Among the awards we received were two Gold Addys recognizing our creative work on the MM Cinemas “Pinball” project in the categories of cinema advertising and animation/visual effects.

Additional recognition highlited our achievement in animation and visual effects for the Bimbo “Donitas” project, as well as the innovative work we accomplished with Sigma Alimentos “Solé Kids”. Here’s a complete list of all this year’s honorees.

There was an 80’s theme to the evening’s celebration so the Geomedia crew donned our Devo Energy Domes (see how they were made) and slipped into our “Geo” brand turtlenecks and appreciatively accepted our decoration.

(L-R: Zach Nasits, Jeremy Kenisky, Martin Jaeger, Rudy Martinez, Joe Schaertl, Murray Breit, Jeff Chesnut, Troy Davis)

Actually we had a great time and look forward to creating more award winning work again this year.

Technorati tag: advertising agencies

The metaphor of a single seed from which grows the mighty oak, symbolizes the humble beginnings and 100 year rise to prominence of the international business conglomerate Grupo Salinas in a recently completed :30 for Filmmates Mexico City.

Director Manuel Bierjerman envisioned a time-lapse progression from a vintage, undeveloped landscape, to a fully formed modern Mexican city park spanning 100 years of history. With an ethereal feel and a palette inspired by the famous Mexican artist Doc Atl, the spot is set in motion by a young girl nurturing a seedling. The sapling grows and a city develops… Driven by the economic opportunity created by the young company, then known as Salinas y Rocha. As the evolution brings us to the present day, the girl again appears at the site of the now towering oak, this time as the elderly matriarch. Along with her, generations of offspring symbolize the growing family of companies under the Grupo Salinas brand.

Principle photography of the little girl, the family and actors portraying company employees, was filmed in Mexico City in green screen under the supervision of our Animation Director Troy Davis. Aside from these few live-action elements, the entire spot was realized by Geomedia artists completely in CG. As if the prospect of animating a growing tree weren’t daunting enough, our animators also had to create and choreograph thousands of CG characters, animate a city evolving over 100 years, create a CG landscape with mountains and sky… and ultimately have all the CG elements come together to match the live-action footage, in one continuous shot… All in 30 seconds!

During pre-pro meetings I suggested we investigate a specialized software package for the creation of our tree. I’d heard of a tool with the curious name “Xfrog” from German software developer Greenworks in Berlin. The software was originally developed for the SGI platform and it’s name is an acronym which stands for X-windows based Finite Recursive Object Generator. We tested the software and consulted with the original developer in Duisburg, Timm Dapper. The software is available as a stand-alone but was also available as a plugin to one of our workhorse 3D packages Cinema 4D. Early tests were encouraging. The tool had extensive control, including such esoteric parameters as “branch deviation, tropism and phyllotaxis“… What fun! We decided to proceed with Xfrog for the design and animation of our tree. As I had gone and opened my big mouth to suggest it, I was given the task!

It’s projects like this that have made me pre-maturely gray! Animation parameters that seemed perfectly capable during early testing, quickly fell apart when pushed to the extent required to grow a tree from sapling to full maturity. The interrelatedness of control parameters was particularly frustrating. Just when we were having success with one parameter, another would be wrecked or cause anomalies in the motion or the generation of subsequent branching. It all went around in a seemingly infinite loop of madness for nearly a month! Finally after lots of brute force keyframing, I wrangled the thing into submission and we had our hero tree. In spite of the difficulties with Xfrog, it is brilliant software and I shudder to think of having to pull off such a complex task in a conventional 3D package. Camera data, exported from XSI in .fbx format, was imported into C4D to match final camera animation. Beauty, shadow and ground passes were rendered for later compositing into the final scene underway in XSI.

All the while I was trying to avert insanity over the tree animation, Troy had his hands full trying to fit over 2500 3D characters through the pipeline! The director called for crowds of “employees” to encircle the tree while the (virtual) camera cranes overhead. In the final shot the employees turn over cards forming the logos of the various companies under the Grupo Salinas corporate umbrella. In a final card flip the Grupo Salinas logo is formed.

To accomplish the effect, a library of digital characters were modeled and rigged in XSI. Walk cycles and a card lift sequence were animated for each character. Troy then wrote a custom script which would arbitrarily select from this library and place the characters in a radiating position around the tree. Random seed values were incorporated into the script in order to position characters in natural distances and angles relative to one another. Scripting also controlled the timing of the characters as they walked and lifted their cards overhead. The animation of the cards and the parsing of the shared texture map of logos was also choreographed via custom scripts. The complexity of executing the scripts (not to mention writing them!) as well as the shear volume of geometry involved, made for extremely slow going during this phase. Extensive optimization of the scene as well as delicate settings within XSI to optimize the Mental Ray renderer, were required before the scene would render without choking!

The time-lapse evolution of the city skyline was also modeled, animated and rendered within XSI. The client supplied photo references of period architecture and descriptions of the early Salinas y Rocha building and it’s various incarnations to the present day. Geomedia 3D whiz kid extraordinaire, Jeremy Kenisky, painstakingly modeled and animated each building as it is “built” from the ground up. Jeremy also created the sequence of the original SyR store as it undergoes a dramatic transformation between its intermediate forms and it’s familiar current day modern architecture and signage.

Another complex piece of the puzzle involved the natural environment in which the entire spot takes place. The director wanted to see an empty vista stretching to a horizon defined by foothills and distant mountains. As the city evolves the natural landscape transforms into a manicured city park. He imagined clouds passing rapidly overhead to further enhance the stylized passage of time. Early in the project we considered stock photography and time-lapse cloud video but we could not find the perfect combination of perspective or point of view. The single camera pull out and overhead move also presented problems with this approach. We would have to somehow do the environment in 3D.

Like a dumb ass I once again stuck my foot in my mouth and suggested we consider yet another unfamiliar software package to get the job done. Vue Infinite from e-on software turned out to be just the ticket. The software has amazing tools for creating natural landscapes and photo-realistic atmospheres but it’s unorthodox user interface and approach took some getting used to. The biggest problem (besides the horrendous render times) was getting camera data from XSI into our Vue scene. The beta version of Vue we were using had no native XSI support. We finally discovered a circuitous route through various 3D packages to convert the data into something Vue would recognize. The final rendered landscape matched seamlessly.

The live action plates and final rendered CG output from the disparate software packages, were composited in After Effects. Keying, color correction and extensive FX work were also performed to blend all the elements and impart the soft atmospheric feel and painterly palette the director called for.

The spot was an enormous technical and artistic challenge for the Geomedia team and I’m humbled by their show of skill and tenacity over the long hours required to see the project to completion… Having the director declare that the finished spot surpassed the vision even he had in his own minds eye, makes it all worth it.

The designer’s salon of San Antonio’s premier department store was the setting of Geomedia’s recent video production for Five Star Cleaners. Our biggest challenge for this shoot was our limited time at the location.

All production had to conclude before the store opened at 10am. So with that in mind, we used a skeleton crew and minimal gear. The idea was to utilize the hundreds of pre-positioned spotlights the store uses to beautifully illuminate their fashionable store displays. Great plan. Unfortunately when we arrived, the lights, (which normally go on at 7am), had been reprogrammed the day before to come on at 9:45am. Undeterred, we made our best of the situation. The store’s staff worked diligently on the lighting issue while we shot all we could with what lights we brought. Gaffer George Nelson was johnny-on-the-spot with some creative uses of the Leikos we had brought.

In time, all the store lights came on and we got our shots. The store’s staff couldn’t have been more helpful. It’s so great to have a location host be so understanding of production issues and do their best to help. And the shots looked great. We shot in 16×9 format at 24p with a Canon XL2. The footage looked like it came out of much higher quality format camera. Smiley who deftly shot and edited this spot, even got to use his beloved skater dolly on a few of the setups. Considering the time constraints and limited crew and gear both the agency, The PM Group, and client were very happy with the end result.

CLIENT: Five Star Cleaners

AGENCY: The PM Group
Marion DeWall, Creative Director

PRODUCTION: Geomedia, Inc.
Murray Breit, Director
Smiley Garcia, DP
George Nelson, Gaffer
Cynthia Hancevic, Makeup

POST PRODUCTION: Geomedia, Inc.
Smiley Garcia, Editor
Martin Jaeger, Colorist, Animation, Graphic Design

Be the ball… In this final installment of a trifecta of visual FX spots for Mexico theater chain MM Cinemas, we take the viewer on a pinball’s journey through the machine. Completing a huge re-branding campaign, this exciting, fast-paced theatrical policy trailer reinforces the company’s brand partners and touts the theater’s numerous amenities while encouraging courteous behavior from it’s patrons. This project is the culmination of our efforts through agency SOS Publicidad for client MM Cinemas, in what has been a very successful transition for the company.

Given only the general concept, it was up to us to design the look, direct the action and move the story. In addition to reiterating the typical policy message i.e. turn off cell phones, no smoking… We also had to highlight features such as digital surround sound, the food court, wide aisles and comfortable seating… among others.

Conveying these messages with only a few pop bumpers, flags and drop targets proved to be quite a challenge. For some of the trickier concepts we departed from traditional pinball mechanisms and scale. A good example of solutions for some of the more difficult to convey messages are the scenes describing stadium seating and digital audio.

With most of the story-line and visuals figured out we began constructing the pinball machine. 3D modeling was carried out in Softimage/XSI practically single-handedly by our own Jeremy Kenisky. It was like modeling a small city! There were hundreds of individual elements to construct and numerous iterations of the model were presented before reaching it’s final form. The model had to literally function yet be consistent and visually interesting. Design modifications and additions occurred right up to final delivery as we made sure were getting the best use of available real estate to tell our story.

As the model neared completion, references of it’s geometry were sent to the graphics department to begin the arduous task of texturing. Geomedia artist Rudy Martinez handled the bulk of the 2D design of the table and prepared most the texture maps. A blackbelt in both Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop, He crafted a beautiful theme and palette based on the re-branded motif of the theaters. Additionally, hundreds of functional design elements i.e. arrows, pathways, logos, lights… would need to be designed and consistently integrated. All textures received careful attention to insure sufficient resolution in close-up shots. It was an enormous undertaking given the huge number of geometric elements in the model, all requiring individual textures. Rudy also designed and animated 2D motion textures which appeared on the backglass and pathways. The finished spot would not have turned out as special without such terrific design and artwork… Kudo’s Rudy!

While modeling and texturing continued, scene blocking, animation and lighting were being developed. Animation Director Troy Davis was responsible for lighting and the overall look of the spot. Troy also oversaw animation and camera work as well as render wrangling and technical direction. The scene had well over 100 lights. High dynamic range (HDRI) arcade environment maps were used to great effect on the highly reflective pinball and metallic surfaces of the machine. Ambient occlusion, shadow and motion vector passes were rendered separately to be incorporated later in compositing. A particularly challenging aspect to the lighting was the sequencing of lights illuminating the playfield during specific moments of game play. The pinball table had around 75 embedded playfield lights. Manually keying believable and interesting sequences would be a bit tedious… Scripting to the rescue! Geomedia artists developed a small animated image map which corresponded with the placement of the 3D playfield lights in XSI. Troy wrote a script in which a light is triggered to be on or off based on the animated image map. Utilizing this method quick changes could be made to the lighting sequences simply by editing the animation of the 2D image map in After Effects. We tweaked the image map animation until we had something we liked and then plugged it into our XSI script to trigger all the lights automatically… Brilliant!

Rendered image passes of the film-resolution frames were composited in After Effects. Ambient occlusion and shadow levels were dialed in. Motion vector data files output from XSI were utilized in the composite to generate motion blur as a post effect. This greatly reduced the already substantial rendering burden of processing the 2K files. Color correction tweaks and subtle glow effects were added on a shot-by-shot basis as needed. Fireworks effects were created via 2D particle system and tracked to match the camera move in the climactic final crescendo as the player scores the ultimate point. Audio was scored and posted in Mexico. Final frames were delivered as digital files for film-out and duplication in Mexico City.

Once again, I’m thrilled by the creativity, talent and teamwork exhibited by the entire Geomedia crew in pulling off such a large and complex project. We’re told that the spot looks awesome on the big screen. We’ve received effusive compliments from the MM Cinemas client and the spot has become very popular with the audiences.

ENJOY THE SHOW!!

CLIENT: MM Cinemas

AGENCY: SOS Publicidad

ANIMATION/FX: Geomedia, Inc.
Troy Davis, Animation Director
Martin Jaeger, Compositing/FX
Jeremy Kenisky, 3D Modeling/Animation
Rudy Martinez, Graphics/2D Animation