Images from Minis spot online

A couple of nice stills from the Ruby Tuesday Mini Cooper tie-in spot ("The Great Race") are online on the fxguide article. Check 'em out!

Mini fans...

...I hear you. I know you would like to see the Ruby Tuesday spot online, and I am working on getting it up for you to see. Honest!

In the meantime, here's a glimpse of how I previsualized the choreography of the cars for the spot. I created an animatic using After Effects 7. I only had a few days, so I wanted to create an easy way to make some exciting car-to-car shots featuring four Mini Cooper S cars driving in tight, Blue Angels-like configuration.

What I did was create a rig that allowed me to animate a simple positioner (a null). The car would then follow the null, but with a certain amount of "slop." The suspension would bounce and sway (far too much to emulate an actual Mini, but that's creative license for you!). When I move the null to the left, the wheels steer, the car swerves, the tail kicks out, and the body rolls, all with two simple keyframes of animation. In this way I was able to quickly and painlessly animate four cars per shot and crank out 20 or 30 shots in a few days.

To capture the gritty, racing-inspired authenticity that I wanted for this spot, I looked at a lot of car chase movies, especially Ronin. One signature characteristic of Frankenheimer's amazing footage is that the camera car is experiencing the same extreme forces and duress as the car it is chasing. So I created a fifth Mini and "bolted" my After Effects camera it it, to give my animation a car-to-car photography feel.

In the movie below you can see a shot from the finished spot as it appeared in the animatic. I've extended the shot and turned off the camera car's motion so you can see the hero Mini in action. The null is represented by the little red, green and blue axis — you can see how simple its motion is compared to how lively the car is.

The cars look almost 3D, but they are in fact 2.5D, composed entirely of 2D cards in 3D space. You can see this when the wheels steer towards the camera. Why create such a complex 3D project inside After Effects? Because you can!

This animatic, cut together in Final Cut Pro, became the blueprint of our shoot, which spanned two days and involved the Ruby Tuesday bar set (with and without the actual bar in place) and four full-sized Minis. More on that later, but hopefully this fun little animation will keep the Mini owners satisfied for a little while!

The bag is out from around the cat

As readers of DVXuser.com have found out, I am working on a book about digital filmmaking:

The DV Rebel's Guide : An All-Digital Approach to Making Killer Action Movies on the Cheap

You know, what with all my spare time and all.

More to come on this, but as the book is still in progess, feel free to comment on what you might like to see covered!

Orphanage Wraps Ruby Tuesday Spot

I just put the finishing touches on my first Superbowl spot. If there's a Ruby Tuesday restaurant near you, you might just see my :30 that features a tie-in with Mini Cooper in between Bud spots on Sunday.

This spot is my most ambitious to date — a sort of miniature Italian Job on a Ruby Tuesday bar top. We created photoreal CG Mini Coopers and finished the spot in HD as a :30 and a :45. We pushed digital filmmaking technology forward by shooting, uhm, film (with the masterful Mr. John Stanier behind the lens). Hey, someone has to do it.

Another fun thing I did for this spot was create a detailed 3D animatic in After Effects 7, something I hope to post here about.