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From the November 15, 1999 issue of Playback Journal "How'd They Do That?"By Peter Vames The scene is a crowded nightclub. The patrons are frozen, chilled by the frigid air emitting from a cold drink at the bar. A woman stands at the counter reaching for the drink. Suddenly, cracks form, spread and the woman breaks into chunks of ice and snow that fall to the misty floor.
Bringing this sequemce to life was the challenge faced by Vancouver-based Lost Boys Studios when they signed on to create a cool cliamte for a Bacardi drink called Limon. Four playes were shot on 35mm at 180 frames per second to creat the effect. Plate one framed the room without the woman or crowd; plate two contained the crowd and snow particles; plate three added dry-ice mist and chunks of ice falling to the ground; plate four was a clean plate containing only the woman. The shot plate was created by mathing a 3D model of the woman over the actor. To give the appearance of cracks forming and spreading along her face and arm, close-ups were hand-painted frame by frame and animated in compositing. Two separate 3D elements were then rendered: one breaking the girl into large chunks, the other breaking her into small pieces. To give the realtime feel to the ice chunks as they crumbled to the ground, Lost Boys' artists used a combination of keyframe animation and dynamic simulation. Finally, the 3D elements were composited and matched with the live-action plates of the woman standing at the bar, and ice falling. The Gear; Alias|Wavefront Maya was used to create a model of the woman and animate the chunks falling away. Compositing was done in Discreet Logic Inferno. The Artists; Geoff Richardson was the head digital effects compositor and on-set supervisor, along with Mark Benard, Erik Ellefsen, Allan Henderson and Eric Petey created 3D animation; and Kevin Genzel and Judy D. Shane handled digital compositing; Pauline Burns was the visual effects coordinator; Javier Aguilera directed the live action.  |
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