Glassworks Makes Waves for HP, Bang & Olufsen
By Katie Makal
Mar 11, 2003, 12:43 PST
London digital animation and effects company Glassworks worked on a commercial for Hewlett-Packard and Bang & Olufsen through U.S. agency Goodby, Silverstein & Partners. Creatives Steve Goodblatt and Mike McCommon devised the spot that was directed by Tim Hope at Passion Pictures. The commercial is to air in the United Kingdom in late March.
The concept of the spot sees Hewlett-Packard collaborating with Bang & Olufsen to invent a camera that can actually see sound waves. These waves show direction, volume and pitch, and how they might vary in different scenarios. For example, the sound waves from a dog's bark are large, booming and powerful enough to knock a boy off his bike, while those from a flock of birds in flight were much smaller, finer and tighter. Director Tim Hope wanted to convey a sense of how new this amazing camera is by giving the whole commercial a stylized, desaturated feel coupled with a heavy grain, grade and tight vignettes.
The spot takes place in a park, where a variety of characters explore the different ways in which their own sounds affect the world around them. An old man with a penny whistle creates gentle rings of sound like ripples in a pond; birds tweet with short, sharp flashes of noise; a couple whispers sweet nothings in each other's ears; and a boy cycles past, happily whistling to himself. Suddenly a dog barks -- time freezes for a second as the camera swings around the scene. The sound from the bark then bursts like a bubble. It shatters the tranquillity with booming waves of sound that spread across the park, blasting everything in their path, including knocking the boy on his bike off balance.
A breakdancer performs in the park; the sound waves emanating from the speakers in front of him are rhythmic and follow patterns with the music. The sound coming toward him forms a wall. The camera slows down and pans around him as he dances through it -- the effect is achieved using time-slice photography. The spot closes with a man in a flat overlooking the city closing his windows to shut out the noise from the park; he sits and relaxes in front of two speakers emanating calm, circular sound waves that drift over him.
This project took seven weeks to complete -- much of that time was used experimenting with different ways of visualizing sound. Glassworks worked closely with Tim Hope to create the right effect needed for the spot. The experimentation led Glassworks to work in a different way, with all of the 2D and 3D artists on the project working closely in the same room. Each effect could be then developed between both the 2D and 3D teams simultaneously, with excellent communication between the teams facilitating a highly creative atmosphere.
''The effects in the spot were achieved in many different ways after much experimenting,'' said Anders Thonell, 3D artist at Glassworks. ''Some of the animation was driven using the sound waves themselves and others such, as the dog bark, were completely hand animated.''
The time-slice technique, completed with the help of specialist company The Big Freeze, was used to achieve the dog bark effect. The rig used 90 cameras timed to trigger in quick succession to achieve the standing still effect that the technique produces. This footage was then stabilized in inferno*; and Glassworks used Twixtor to interpolate the live-action frames.
The camera tracking information was then passed to 3D to give the team the camera positioning. The dog bark effect contains four main aspects: first, the outline of the bubble itself, which is white, and hand animated to give the overall shape; the second was the shards of light and distortion that shoot outside the bubble. Both of these elements were completed in 3D. The 3D team created a model of the dog's head so that it could be immersed in the bubble itself. These 3D elements were then passed back to the 2D team, who used the background as refraction and applied it to the 3D elements, giving the final aspect of the effect.
The background and much of the park itself were also built in 3D at Glassworks. Thonell explained, ''We were provided with a lot of artwork from Passion Pictures as a guide to how the landscape should look. We used maps and drawings to calculate rough distances and did a lot of pre-visualistion work with Tim Hope. We built the 3D buildings almost like Lego blocks so that we could move them around and build them up and down until we had achieved the right look and feel.''
Other effects in the spot were generated in both 2D and 3D. Some of these effects used actual sound wave patterns as a guide for the animators; others were completed by hand. Grading was applied in 2D to give the commercial its stylized feel. It took seven weeks to complete using inferno*, flame*, SOFTIMAGE/XSI, Maya, 3ds max, LightWave and Twixtor.
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