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.

Vancouver effects shop Rainmaker Digital Pictures has had a recent string of post successes with an ongoing campaign for Manitoba-based telecommunications company MTS. The shop has elicited many a grin in the birthplace of the Guess Who with its contributions to the campaign – about 20 spots to date and counting.

The ads feature Morty, the talking bison, who, to the surprise of Rainmaker producer Terry Hutcheson, has become somewhat of a cultural icon in the province.

‘They’re going over so well,’ says Hutcheson. ‘They’ve kind of worked their way into the culture now in Manitoba. Little kids are quoting them, people write in to the newspapers in Manitoba about them. It’s the mark of a good spot I guess.’

The bison was a natural spokes… uh…mammal for MTS, given it is Manitoba’s official animal. Hutcheson says MTS originally approached Rainmaker to help Morty with his lip-synching. They had to find a way to sync his CG mouth with the dialogue track. Little did Hutcheson and the Rainmaker staff know, talking was the first of many tasks agency Cossette Communications, Vancouver would ask for.

‘Since then, they’ve got Morty doing everything,’ says Hutcheson. ‘He’s wearing sweaters, he’s playing golf, and in a coming spot he is actually going to go surfing. It’s been a fun collaborative process for us where we get to push the limits of what a bison can do.’

Hutcheson says the biggest hurdle for the production, post-production and effects teams is the bison itself. At the end of the shooting day, Morty is still a bison and hard to keep tabs on as he goes about his business.

‘The biggest challenge has been that you are dealing with this 2,000-pound animal that won’t do what you want him to do,’ says Hutcheson. ‘It’s going to go wherever it wants to. For the editor, Jayne Morris Berry [of Vancouver’s JMB Post], she is having to keep with the script, but what’s in the script is not always what the bison is doing. She has to find little snippets of just the right head motion that we have to try to make look fluid.’

When Rainmaker gets a shot at the footage, the first order of business is making the animal speak. This process alone is laborious, even before outfitting him with golf clubs or a surfboard.

The animators at Rainmaker first must break down the audio track, then work with a 3D model of Morty’s mouth and various stored movements for common vowel and consonant sounds using Softimage. The artists then match the mouth movements to the audio they’ve been given. This is no easy task, according to Hutcheson, because like his barnyard relative the cow, Morty is constantly chewing cud, making his mouth difficult to cover.

It always gets done though, and once perfected Rainmaker imports the 2D footage of the bison using 3D Equalizer software before adding animated extras like the flying bison circling Morty’s head in the latest MTS ad, ‘Whack in the Head.’

‘In that one you see a foreground bison and a small one off in the background and you hear this whack, like a golf club, from off in the distance. A golf ball comes and hits the foreground bison in the head,’ explains Hutcheson.

‘The agency wanted a cartoony-like effect, like in Bugs Bunny when they get hit in the head and the little tweeting birds come out and fly around. Then they decided instead of birds, what if they were little bison with wings? It cuts from him getting hit in the head to a close-up of these tiny cartoon bison flying around his head while the foreground bison’s eyeballs are rolling back in his head.’

Hutcheson says the animators, compositors and colorists at Rainmaker take the lighthearted spots very seriously.

‘There is a big team here and there are a lot people who have helped out,’ says Hutcheson. ‘These are spots that the artists here get really excited about working on. They know the spots are popular so they want to do a really good job on them.’ *

-www.rainmaker.com