Animation

I couldn’t help posting this - it’s the latest trailer from Red Bee Media to promote a new BBC documentary on Saddam Hussein called “The House of Saddam.” From the chilling Godfather-reminiscent horn solo to the stunning special effects used to melt the characters, I’ve probably watched this a dozen times…

taken from the Finish website:

Focusing on the lives of Saddam’s closest family and an elite few, this intimate portrait into the world of Saddam’s inner circle charts the rise and fall of one of the world’s most terrifying regimes.

The series takes place against the backdrop of the larger tragedy of the Iraqi people, and draws out the story of the Middle East’s relationship with the West.

Working from supplied publicity stills and a small fx shoot for elements Finish’s brief was to bring the pictures to life. Using 2D to morph between stills to add movement and create contra zooms on the family portraits. In 3D we textured a head with the available stills and using maya fluids & maya particles ‘melted’ Saddam & his daughters face, with 2D additional compositing of plates from the fx shoot to give the overall ‘melting’ of the family.

Edel Erickson was the agency producer for Red Bee Media (where Mina Patel is Creative Director). This promo was directed by Wilfred and featured the folks over at Finish as the post-production outfit. It was edited by Alex Lea from Envy. Fi Kilroe was the post-production producer with Jason Watts/Steve Murgatroyd getting credit for the Visual FX. The 3D animation was done by Mark Gregory, Phil Jackson and Paul Wright (Byron Wooffindin was the Flame Assistant).

To showcase HP’s environmentally friendly solution for 3M’s printing problem, Goodby Silverstein & Partners has created a four-part series to air on HP’s Enterprise Services portal.

Using stop-motion photography in combination with live-action shots, director Bucky Fukumoto shows us a pretty cool series using 3M’s Post-Its to help tell the story.

Here are the other three parts in this series:
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Wieden + Kennedy brings us this new spot for The Coca-Cola Company featuring animated versions of Yao Ming and LeBron James in preparation for the 2008 Olympic Games. Pretty cool 3D effects in this spot as each character brings out stereotypical icons from China/USA in preparation for their battle. It ends before it even starts though as both superstars eventually bond together over a cold bottle of Coca-Cola (I didn’t see that one coming), giving us the message of “Unity.”

Dylan Lee and Mira Kaddoura schemed up this spot as the copywriter/art director with Hal Curtis and Sheena Brady as the W+K creative directors. The commercial was produced by Kevin Diller and had Nexus as the production company. Smith & Foulkes directed with Melody Sylvester as the producer (Julia Parfitt was the executive producer). Cliff Wilson from Digital One did all the post production audio work with music credits going to Eclectic.