Summary
Numbers this big are hard to ignore: at Arca|Ex, the world’s largest fully electronic stock exchange, 575 million US shares are traded daily. This 2-spot campaign, with a hint of Hitchcock horror, exemplifies the power of large numbers. In ‘Birds’, a couple on a park bench are idly feeding the pigeons but get up in alarm when they find themselves surrounded by an ever-increasing number of birds. Numbers also get out of hand in ‘Chess’, when two elderly chess players are suddenly besieged by an ever-growing crowd of spectators.
Matthijs Van Heijningen, one of Europe's most acclaimed
commercial directors did a fine job of eliciting unspoken alarm in
the faces of the actors as the number of birds increases
exponentially. The Mill London and New York offices worked
symbiotically on this project, which needed a lot of 2D and 3D
work. It was the first time The Mill had fully exploited its total
connectivity via a newly dedicated 45-Mb pipeline linking Flame
suites and CG workstations across the Atlantic. With broadcast
quality material sent in half real-time both facilities could run
in tandem.
For 'Birds', Ben Smith led The Mill 3D team who had to familiarise
themselves with all-things-birdlike by spending a day with a London
pigeon fancier. To make a convincingly varied mass of birds, Ben
created 3D pigeons, blackbirds, starlings and cowbirds, then
developed them in a variety of resolutions: hi-res birds could fly,
land and walk, while low-res birds could do only one of those. Each
bird type was rendered in a variety of textures, including pattern,
wing features, and colour. At The Mill NY, Dadi created a bank of
animation cycles for flying, flapping, pecking, walking, perching,
landing, and so on. Using all of these variables the team created
tens of thousands of unique birds. A bespoke particle
goal-simulation system was used to make the 3D birds head for the
same area while maintaining realistic distribution both in the air
and on the ground. Jordi Baras wrote a special script to ensure
landings were randomly off-set.
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