Vancouver post-production and visual effects house Rainmaker Digital Pictures was recently enlisted to create special effects reminiscent of The Matrix| in a Frito-Lay commercial for the Central American, South American and Asian markets. The ad, launching Doritos 3-D chips, was produced by Mexico-based Aqua Films for BBDO Mexico.

In the spot, a young couple snatches a bag of the snacks from a high-tech, high-security stronghold and is subsequently pursued by two guards into a hostile alternate reality cityscape. A series of death-defying escapes ensues, culminating with our protagonists leaping into a magic portal and safely returning to the real world to enjoy their ill-gotten booty.

Rainmaker estimates 85% of the spot is effects and cg work. Director Carlos Rusansky from Aqua Films collaborated closely with both Rainmaker’s visual effects team and its production facility, The Crossing Effects Studio, where two days of live-action green-screen shooting was performed involving flying rigs and breakaway glass.

Rainmaker built the virtual city background Rusansky envisioned by fusing futuristic skyscrapers with art deco stylings. Rainmaker animators constructed the buildings with attention to minute architectural details, and also did the modeling and animation of a cg Doritos chip, which had to be laboriously tracked to match the live-action camera moves.

The gear: NewTek LightWave for computer animation; Discreet Flame and Inferno for visual effects and compositing; Cintel C-Reality for film-to-video transfer.

The artists: bbdo creative director, Carl Jones; executive producer, Alvaro Hernandez; dop, Gary Manske; Rainmaker visual effects supervisor, Brian Moylan; compositors, Rosano Lepri, Michael Porterfield, Tom Archer, Bruce Woloshyn, Halbo Van der Klauuw; animators, Marc Roth, Trevor Cawood, Neill Blomkamp, Wes Sargent; colorist, Achim Kapitza; executive producer, Terry Hutcheson; co-ordinator, Denise Bradley.

www. rainmaker.com

Mark Dillon