"The wave".(DDB Worldwide, Budweiser, advertising contract)

BUDWEISER

Agency: DDB Chicago

Director: Paul Middleditch Production company: HSI Visual effects: Method Studios

In this spot, the stadium "wave" becomes a way for thousands of people with placards to create an eye-catching feat: to open a bottle of Budweiser, tilt it so the stream of beer goes halfway around the stadium of 97,000 virtual fans to fill a glass with the beer, and then drink it down. After the shooting boards came in, says Method Studios' producer Kim Wildenburg, the team went through a careful previsualization stage, done by Pixel Liberation Front, to determine how the spot would cut together and, just as important, that the production company, agency, and VFX studio were all on the same page.

The two-day shoot took place at the LA Coliseum with 300 extras, who would form the foreground, augmented by thousands of Massive Software characters situated in the back rows of the stadium. Wildenburg, along with Method Studios' CG director Laurent Ledru, attended the shoot, which included eight helicopter plates. For the shot that pans across the entire stadium, the crew moved the 300 extras en masse around the stadium to get nine separate shots.

"The first test was to build the stadium and place the Massive agents so they lined up with all the plates," says 3D VFX artist James LeBloch, who handled the Massive Software shots. To solve the problem of placing 90,000 virtual characters within the rows and aisles, Method Studios' software developer, Andrew Bell, wrote a script to export placement of the characters from Autodesk's Maya (used for modeling) into Massive. "Ultimately, what we did was model the stadium as NURBS geometry, and then the script gave James some controls that allowed him to define a region on the model and say how many rows and seats were in that region," explains Bell. "Then the script would iterate those specifications and come up with a Massive setup that matched."

All the placards were also CG, rendered in Maya, and the same placement created for Massive was used to generate the CG cards and put them in their proper location. The football teams are also Massive agents, says LeBloch, who notes the players were similar agents with adjusted textures and football uniforms. CG lights matched the lighting in the background plates.