Harbor Picture Company Collaboration – Team Frost

About This Project

Stay Cool! This short visual effects commercial for ICE BREAKERS mints was created as part of a 10 week collaborative experience. I was paired up with two brilliant FX artists, Kaden Lewis and Avery Chang. We were given weekly feedback by mentors from Harbor Picture Company. My role on the team was as the CG generalist. I created any models or shaders we needed to tell our story. I also had other various responsibilities for this project, such as compositor, photographer, storyboard artist, and sound editor.

This blog will encompass my week-to-week experience as I worked throughout this process. Each “week” was made up of two 2 1/2 hour meetings with our team and mentors, as well as viewing and gaining inspiration from the critique of other groups.

Week One:

In this first Week, my group was assigned and made quick work deciding on our pitch. We had two prompts to choose from, either a commercial with live action plating or a fully CG commercial. My team immediately agreed on creating a commercial with live action plating, as we share the mindset that integrating VFX into footage is more exciting than the effects viewed on their own.

My other two team members are Houdini-oriented FX artists, so we first approached this creative issue by thinking of what FX we had experience with, and what we would be excited to create. I also kept our ball rolling on decision making by asking group questions like “What’s the last thing you bought?” and “What’s an item that people want?”

Ultimately, we settled on an ICE BREAKERS mints commercial, as I was inspired by their clean and fun commercials. My teammates were exciting to work on ice FX, fog FX, snow and other frosty effects. With this agreement, Team Topaz became Team Frost and began steadfast work on the pitch!

Week Two:

In week two, we finally got the chance to share our pitch with Harbor Picture Company and get some very valuable feedback! To prepare for this pitch, our team got together Sunday evening and went through our slideshow and storyboards in an attempt to nail down our timing and pacing. To prepare Team Frost’s pitch personally, I created some rudimentary storyboards in Photoshop using stock images. This is my preferred method of initial ideation, as it’s lightning fast in getting my ideas realized.

However, the bullet pointed explanations I added to our presentation didn’t make it to our pitch, Harbor only got to see the images themselves. Luckily, Avery had a detailed blog with his 3D previs he created in Houdini and our reference videos from other ICE BREAKERS commercials. Fun Fact: ICE BREAKERS is always capitalized!

The biggest pieces of advice and feedback we got from Harbor were to focus on planning and prioritization. For example, they thought our transition from shot 4 to shot 5 was complicated, so we should begin working on it as soon as possible. Overall, our mentors were excited by our project, but they thought it was a very complex sequence. It will take some real dedication and persistence to see it through by week 9.

Week Three:

Week three was all about development. Look development for me, and FX research and development for the rest of my team. In class 5, we got another chance to share our updated pitch with Harbor. Their biggest piece of feedback from our pitch last week was that our concept wasn’t clear. They were unsure of when the particular FX came into play.

In this week, I put together our Look Development Rig in Houdini, and started building our shaders in Redshift on Houdini. I had never used Redshift to create materials before, so there was a bit of a learning curve, especially so for applying a texture to an object.

Week Four:

In leading up to week four, I finally prepared our group for our production/film shoot. I contacted my friend Geoff Nava-Jordan, a performing arts major, and Emily McDowell, an advertising major. I was initally going to use my other friend Austyn, though he was unavailable when we needed him. I rented a camera from Montgomery Hall, and set a date and time. We shot our film at Blue Door Cafe in Savannah. They are notoriously friendly to students filming projects.

I made sure to take all photographs necessary for a smooth and successful CG integration.

The cut above is the result of all of our photographic efforts. This was my first time using this model of camera, so there were some unfamiliar elements such as seeing the histogram while I was filming. Our actors did a swell job in taking direction. Later, we would find out, there is a bit of trouble with Geoff having pink hair highlights. They make his general form less recognizable.

Week Five:

In the week 4 presentation, we gained some really valuable feedback about the direction of our project. Billy, Kyle, Molly, and Olivia let us know that:

• The background was too busy. We needed a plainer background.
• Our actress needed to actually open her mouth to make the frost breath effect believable.
• The framing for our shot 5 could be made better. Perhaps with a rack focus.

So, naturally, I went ahead and planned our next shoot!

Week Six:

Using the footage captured in week five, I went ahead and redid some of the steps necessary for integrating our CG and FX. With the rust shaken off from performing the integration process in week four, this went quickly.

Shot 5 CG Scene Conversion

Team Frost is biting the bullet and converting shot 5 to become entirely CG. It’s not that our plates were unusable, we just need a dynamic camera move and some depth that would only work with a CG scene. We already have our ground plane from the data, we just need to change it to a more visually interesting table. You can see the results/progress in the above video.

One special aspect I added to the CG scene was making a tileable texture for the brick wall in the background!

I started by bringing this still frame into Photoshop. It had the clearest shot of the brick wall out of any frame in our cut. I used a perspective warp and rulers to make the lines parallel.

Of course, it didn’t seamlessly tile right off the bat. I offset the image halfway, then used a clone stamp tool to meticulously repair the seams in the texture. The black and white image is the displacement map I created using the base color. It’s important to make sure the whites in the brick, the cement, are recessed a little bit.

Metahuman Progress

In the feedback from last week, they encouraged us to explore using Metahuman, a subsidiary of Epic. Our 3D scan with Polycam had a few issues. Because we were meticulously scanning our actor over an extended period of time, there were some micro movements that caused errors in the model. The 3D scan’s face was smushed down, and he was missing his hands as a result of wearing matte black gloves during the shoot.

Using the metahuman builder, I created a metahuman to use in shot 5, frozen in ice. I still need to pose and dress the model before I export it or render.

Week Seven

When describing my work to a guest visitor this week, Professor Bridget Gaynor used the phrase “The Ice Man Cometh.” This is precisely what I have been working on this week. Creating our CG man frozen in ice is my duty. So, because there’s a guy frozen in ice for so long, the ice itself needs to look pretty good!

Working on Volumetric noise and render layers.

Week Eight

In our last presentation, I received plenty of poignant, straightforward notes and feedback on how to improve my shot! The specific feedback I got for my shot, (shot 5), was:

• Add rising, residual smoke fumes emanating from ice block
• If possible, add frost to table. Will give ice breakers container more screen presence
• Defocus background.
• There should be no visible/readable labels on the cart props. It’s unnecessary detail
• Add animated depth of field as we push in closer to the ice breakers container
• Add motion blur to ice breakers animation
• Eliminate transmission of blue ice breakers container

In addressing this feedback, I took care of the simplest fixes first. I shifted the keyframes of the icebreakers container so that it flipped up smoothly, more in conjunction with the camera motion.

My next step was cleaning up the background textures slightly. Kyle specifically mentioned that the label on the blue tub in the props on the coffee cart was wholly unnecessary and distracting. It was a simply fix in Photoshop, but it made the composition more concise.

Week Nine

I’d say the biggest one week jump so far is the jump between week eight and week nine, as you can see here. Finally, those color management issues were solved! Turns out

the issue was in Nuke, not Maya/Arnold. I knew there was an issue with the computer’s interpretation of the color, I just wasn’t sure where the problem was taking place until I experimented with the color settings in Nuke.

The most important pieces of feedback the mentors gave in our presentation this week that I could accomplish were to

• Finally match the colors amongst our three scenes.
• Add one final text beat at the end of our sequence to wrap it up nicely
• Mix in the argument audio I had recorded during one of the earlier weeks

It seems simple on the face, but I wanted to do it right. For the color matching, I coordinated with the rest of team frost, and Avery and I agreed to just match our color grading to Kaden’s. His shot had the most direct color direction note, with lightening up his shadows, so it would make sense to apply his solution to our shots.

Magic Text End Title

For the text, I wanted to match it as close as I could to our reference video, while also adding my own original spin (Eh? Eh? You’ll get it, soon) to it.

In our reference video, the words “Stay Cool” fizzle onto screen, with the texture of an ICE BREAKERS mint. My first step was finding a sans serif font that was squat and rounded square. After scrolling through around 75 pages of fonts on Dafont.com, I landed on one called Neufreit.

After settling with that decision, I moved forward with crafting the ICE BREAKERS mints texture, which would need to be suitable in 2D. I knew Substance Painter had a great selection of noise patterns, while Photoshop did not, so I imported a plane from Maya into Substance and started layering my noise patterns.

While this seems fine and dandy, it’s just a little plain. in the reference video, “STAY COOL” actually sparkles like glitter. Only the darker blue spots sparkled this way, also. So I used my compositing foresight and replaced the white background of the ICE BREAKERS mint texture with a chroma key green, to be keyed out later.

The sparkles on the dark blue flecks in the ICE BREAKERS mint texture seemed to glitter and glow at random. Since this was a 2D effect, I figured the best solution was to accomplish this with compositing. In After Effects, I customized and animated the settings in the Fractal Noise effect to create this shifting noise pattern, with more black than white. This will make the perfect alpha for switching from the regular flecks to the glowing flecks.

Compositing Setup for “STAY COOL”

Boom! Just like that, we have our glittery, shimmering, minty tagline that I can use a bit of motion graphics to integrate into our video! Thrilling!

During the week nine critique and feedback session, Molly had suggested we could also turn the background to a shade of blue as the video comes to a close. Accomplishing this was straightforward. Using color correct or grade nodes didn’t give as strong an effect as I was hoping for, so I used a blue constant and animated a mix merge node.