Director: Jon Hollis Production Company: Nice Shirt Films, London, UK Agency: Abbott Mead Vickers BBDO Product: Maltesers, Mars confectionary Legendary London FX artist and director Jon Hollis of Nice Shirt Films recently completed a spot for Mars confection, Maltesers. Working with the line "A lighter way to enjoy commuting", the ad features people blissfully ignoring the laws of gravity, apparently floating/bouncing their way to work through a fantasy cityscape on giant Malteser chocolates resembling space-hoppers. As part of a campaign from influential advertising agency Abbott Mead Vickers BBDO, this is one of a series of ads based around the "A lighter way to..." theme and involved extensive use of The Pixel Farm's powerful tracking system PFTrack3. The brief to create a fantasy cityscape, through which commuters can be seen floating along busy thoroughfares, was based upon 35mm 2K footage of various shots of the London skyline. This footage became the basis for a CG model cityscape so that the "commuters" can be seen floating along specific handpicked routes. Various chroma-key shots of people on spacehoppers were then composited into the virtual cityscape. The overall effect was reliant upon very accurate camera tracking of both the cityscape and chroma-key shots. PFTrack3 was used in both instances to achieve flawless tracking data and various means to make practical use of that data within its single environment. Jon Hollis was a pioneering user of Flame and won several awards for his work at companies such as The Mill, Smoke and Mirrors and Radical Media. He is by no means sentimental about his tools however, explaining, " My opinion on effects is based entirely on the premise that an effect should enhance the script " So despite working with Flame for over ten years he now declares in a very matter of fact way "Flame's becoming redundant now". However his enthusiasm for his current tools of choice is tangible. "I've increasingly been using Maya and Final Cut Pro, and since I've discovered The Pixel Farm products I just don't need Flame much at all now" Using the new image modelling capabilities of PFTrack3 Hollis says that creating the model of the cityscape was easy. PFTrack3 now allows you to import simple geometry which can easily be aligned to geometric shapes in your plate (in this instance, city buildings), fine tune that alignment using simple click controls then use this as the basis for your solve, producing extremely accurate results. In addition to this Hollis was also very impressed by PFTrack's ability to then extract and map native resolution textures from the background plate to authentically render his finished model of the cityscape, commenting, " It's great, the render really stands up to close inspection". Indeed Hollis insists that this ability to quickly create a 3D model perfectly matching elements within the footage with PFTrack saved him a week's work with flawless results. Planning in advance and knowing that the background plate would need to be accurately tracked Hollis deliberately kept the camera movement quit subtle to make the job that much easier. Initially attempting the track using Flame Hollis soon encounted problems. "Funnily enough it was shot 13 that started the problems, so I put it into PFTrack and it was easy". Tracking the chroma-key shots was equally problem free, again saving Hollis a lot of time. He explains " Every shot I tracked for this job I tried just in the application's default mode, and every track was spot on first time" Hollis explains that tracking the same shots in Flame completely failed and besides PFTrack solved the camera in a fraction of the time even from the 2K plates he was using. The fact that so many complimentary and additional routines beyond the core tracking element within a single environment make PFTrack a unique and uniquely useful image data analysis toolset. Where Hollis was able to make use of the speedy and accurate tracking facility he was also able to quickly generate and render perfectly matching 3D models from his background plate and effortlessly export the results to Maya (though he could have chosen any number of supported applications). Such image modelling capabilities (useful for set extensions particularly) along with it's powerful object tracking facility, geometry tracking and Z-depth extraction functions means that PFTrack is becoming an increasingly indispensable bit of kit for the post-production industry. Jon Hollis of Nice Shirt Films, London was at the vanguard of the digital revolution in postproduction. He was one of the first editors to use Avid in London way back in 1992 and subsequently oversaw the setting up of three Avid suites at The Mill where he also became luminary Flame artist winning several awards for his outstanding skills. By 1995 he and two other Flame artists set up FX house Smoke and Mirrors and in 1997 he joined D-Films as a director, went on with fellow directors to buy out D-Films and start up 400 Films in 1999. This was merged with Radical Media in 2001 where he directed a number of very successful spots (such as Orange-Hold-Up, Shweppes-Watering Hole and Drambuie-Chase) and continues to do so within his latest venture Nice Shirt Films. Abbott Mead Vickers BBDO is in its 9th year as the UK's largest advertising agency. The agency continues to build on a successful new business record during 2004 with key wins including Camelot, BT Broadband, Parcelforce, IPC's Nuts, Norwich Union, RAC and, in August 2005, SwitchCo. Recently winning an IPA Effectiveness Gold award for the DOH tobacco-control campaign, the agency was also named 'Agency of the Year' at Eurobest Awards, Europe's leading advertising competition. AMV also secured more awards for more clients than any other agency in the Marketing Society Awards 2005. www.niceshirtfilms.com Words: Martin Southwood