Eye Candy

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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Google, in conjunction with Radiohead, just released an industry first - The first ever music video shot without using a single camera. Only lasers and scanners were used by Zoo Films director James Frost to produce this stunning display of 3D manipulation set to the eerie single off of Radiohead’s latest album, “In Rainbows.”

In order to capture the 3D images, two new technologies were utilized: “Geometic Informatics” and “Velodyne LIDAR.”

…taken from the official google code website:

Geometric Informatics scanning systems produce structured light to capture 3D images at close proximity, while a Velodyne Lidar system that uses multiple lasers is used to capture large environments such as landscapes. In this video, 64 lasers rotating and shooting in a 360 degree radius 900 times per minute produced all the exterior scenes.

You can view a Making Of video below if you’d like to learn more about how this video was made.

An interesting promotion by Google - This has been widely talked about ever since the endeavor was announced, with the technology that is used being a ground-breaking advancement in data imaging.