Post-production and its powers are personified in this column. We’ll cover new techniques, technologies and the creative personnel and companies giving them vibrant visual life.

TOPIX/Mad Dog senior Inferno artist/ designer James Cooper knew he had a big job ahead when he first received the boards for the latest Natrel Milk commercial. The creative from The Sebastian Consultancy partner/creative director Gary Prouk and art director John Speakman was ‘very loose’ and ‘more of a direction than anything else,’ says Cooper.

The spot moves in a steady shot from a meadow on a summer’s day, with little girls skipping about, ladybugs crawling and cows grazing, through a window and into a rustic kitchen. The photographs in the kitchen come to life within their frame, and the spot culminates in a simultaneous milk-pour by a woman in the kitchen and one on her TV set.

The images meld together seamlessly, no mean feat since budget constraints necessitated the use of a lot of stock footage.

‘Probably about 80% of it is stock footage, which is always a little bit dodgy because you are getting it from different sources, shot on different stocks and of different qualities,’ says Cooper. ‘Whenever you are mixing stocks it can be a really tweaky affair just to make it look like it all belongs together. We knew we would need a good bit of time for tweaking to make it all work.’

The mandate for the spot, says Cooper, was ‘real but surreal.’

Steve Manz (still at School at the time) was brought in early in the process to help source the different images from the stock suppliers. Derek Vanlint of The Big Film Company shot the live-action elements.

‘It was a real multimedia extravaganza,’ says Cooper. ‘We used stock, motion footage, 35mm stuff, and CG elements like the dewdrop, the butterfly, the wings of the fairy, and then it all got put together in Inferno.’

Cooper says the Natrel job was a refreshing challenge in that it allowed him to fully use Inferno’s underutilized 3D features.

‘The beauty of Inferno is it is really a 3D package in the sense that there is a camera and lighting and spacial depth,’ says Cooper. ‘For the most part, when you are compositing you are working in a flat 2D world and keying things out, putting them into live action and compositing into a 2D space. In this case we really utilized the 3D nature of Inferno.’

All the elements in the ad – from the flowers and trees to the little girls and fairies fluttering about – were placed at different depths in the spot, creating a sense of perspective, he says.

Another challenge was adding the live footage shot by Vanlint.

‘We didn’t do any motion control or anything, so we had no information with regards to the camera moves Derek had done, and we tried to move that in as best we could visually,’ says Cooper.

He adds that the most rewarding part of the job was far and away the opportunity to fully unlock Inferno’s power.

Celebrating his ninth anniversary at TOPIX, Cooper says, ‘At this stage of my career I’m finding less and less challenge in work that we do, which is why this was particularly good. I’ve used this sort of 3D aspect of Inferno a bit in the past, but never for a full commercial, which was great.’

-www.topix.com

DKP moving on up

TORONTO’S DKP (Dan Krech Productions) has moved its offices and studios to larger digs on Queen Street East to handle the ever-increasing volume of commercial and long-form jobs flowing into the shop.

‘We’ve reshaped the business model based on the volume of work that has come in,’ says creative director Chad Nixon. ‘The idea was to split into two separate divisions, one to handle long form and one for commercial.’

DKP had a busy 2000. After finishing work on DreamWorks’ long-form animated feature Joseph: King of Dreams and a number of commercial campaigns (including a big one for Ford via JWT Detroit), Nixon says the old space was ‘no longer sufficient.’

‘What we wanted was to create a new environment that we could expand into that gives us the opportunity to move to the next level in both the service we supply and the general organization of certain projects.’

According to DKP technical director Terry Dale, the move was also made with clients’ comfort in mind.

‘Our old facility was quite small and everything was a little cramped,’ says Dale. ‘All the suites are much larger than our old editing and compositing areas. We’ve set up two or three comfort zones where the clients can go out of the suite, hang out and have drinks.’

The new DKP space is also more technically sound, providing some interesting features that add to the general ease of everyone working there. Among the advances, each machine/software package can be accessed from any suite.

‘It’s not like we have a Flame room or a Jaleo room,’ says Dale. ‘Everything can be patched to any room you want. We’ve installed a digital router, so routing of digital signals at the facility is extremely easy.’

Dale says the backbone of the DKP network has been upgraded to a gigabyte to speed up transmitting data.

‘The other really positive thing, I think, compared to our other facility is the whole design,’ says Kyran Kelly, DKP’s animation director. ‘For the commercial division, we’ve is set it up in a way that the producers, creative directors and animators can work together for a lot more creative interaction and communication, which I think was more difficult the way we were spread out before.’

‘We’ve been writing a lot of internal software that deals with management of the job,’ says Dale. ‘We have tracking systems as well as internal render cueing software that we’ve designed to help productions go smoother. We are able to keep all of the information in one place, but still have multiple people being able to access the information and know where digital files are as well as scripts and other notes from clients.’

Futureshop and Blockbuster were among the first commercial clients to take advantage of the new facilities. *

-www.dkp.com