“Offspring “Hit That”” by Williams and Lea
Conference:
SIGGRAPH Video Review:
Track:
- 15
Title:
- Offspring “Hit That”
Length:
- 2:58
Director(s):
Company / Institution / Agency:
- Passion Pictures
Description:
A video by Williams and Lea that mixes real with unreal. To achieve this, they created strong, graphically designed characters – part men,part prosthetic, and part CG. The video involved most of the in-house CG team at Passion Pictures to produce the character animation and lip sync. Rushes were responsible for the telecine and Inferno work to create the video’s atmospheric live-actionsettings. Realise Studios handled the CG tracking for the eyes and mouths, and fellow Passion director Darren Walsh and Scary CatStudios made the masks.
The video features a manic dog on a wild rampage from his suburban home to the depths of the city. His owner tracks him down after following his chaotic path (overturned bins, a half eaten leg, and fallen lampposts), determined to tame his wild beast. The Chase reaches its climax with the dog surrounded by his owner, avet, and the dog’s angry illegitimate puppies.
Directors Williams and Lea: “All of our previous projects have been extremely low budget, so it was a nice change for us to be able to work with a full film production crew, model makers, and a GreatDane!”
Hardware:
HARDWARE: PC/Intel dual P4 Xeon 3 GHz CPU, 2 GB RAM. Rendering farm: 125
CPUs.
Software:
SOFTWARE DEVELOPER: Modeling: Lightwave 7.5. Animation: Messiah Studio 1.5. Rendering:
Lightwave 7.5. Compositing: After Effects 5.5, Flame. Additional
software: boujou. Custom software: SuperBlender plug-in for
Messiah used for facial animation and Point Oven 1 used to take
animation from Messiah to LW. OS: Windows 2000 sp3.
Additional Contributors:
Producer: Russell Mclean
Contributors: Andrew Ruhemann, Cath Berclaz, Mark Wilson, Chris Hemming, Jason Nicholas, David Sigrist, Stuart Hall, Stuart Rowbottom, Wes Coman, Nikos Gatos, Antoine Moulineau, Matt Everitt, Loic Le Floch, Bruno Hajnal
Additional Information:
PRODUCTION
Modeling: Subdivision surfaces. Rendering technique used most:Lightwave renderer, mainly shadow-mapped lights. Average CPUtime for rendering per frame: approximately two minutes. Total Production time: 35 days. Production highlight: The process of making the “Hit That” promo was trial and error. The directors used many techniques both in camera and in post production to bring all the elements together. The total post-production time was little more than two weeks, so many creative short cuts had to be devised.
