Freeze Frame.(3D imaging technology in TV commercials)

Artists turn a television commercial into a chilling experience

To demonstrate the fresh taste of Dentyne Ice chewing gum for a recent 30-second television commercial, director Steve Horn "froze" an intimate moment between a young couple at an elegant billiards parlor. The result is impressive, thanks to digital effects created by AFCG and Black Logic, both of New York.

The "Pool Hall" spot begins with a young man attempting a shot as a beautiful young woman captures his attention from across the room. She approaches, popping a piece of Dentyne Ice into her mouth, and kisses him, at which point the room is instantly enveloped in an icy sheen. The spot ends as two frozen billiard balls collide, and one of them shatters into thousands of pieces.

The main 3D effects in "Pool Hall" are the ice and the exploding billiard ball, which were difficult to create because of their unrealistic nature. Yet the real challenge was getting everyone to agree on what those effects should look like, notes Floyd Gillis, president of AFCG. To help nail down the appearance of the ice, Gillis and AFCG animator Steve Burger created a selection of ice surfaces--clear, foggy, cracked, thin, thick--in Side Effects's Houdini, running on SGI workstations. From those options, the production team chose a shiny, cracked, semi-transparent ice surface that would reflect the billiard balls and other areas within the scene.

One effect that didn't require a lot of discussion was the shattering ball, which was done before AFCG was awarded the job. "We did a sample animation in Houdini of the two pool balls hitting each other and one of them breaking apart," Gillis recalls. The previsualization helped Gillis and Burger determine the mechanics and look of the shot early, and as a result, they spent less time creating the effect in postproduction.

Matchmaker

The spot intercuts live footage of the main billiard table and balls with CG replicas. So during the live-action shoot, Gillis and Burger supervised the effects shots to ensure that their digital elements matched the live footage perfectly. "We collected camera data and set measurements," Gillis says. "We even put reflective and diffuse spheres, like shiny Christmas tree ornaments, on the pool table and took pictures of them, since they reflected the whole environment and showed us where all the lights were in the scene." Gillis then re-created the billiard table and several balls in Houdini, ...