Director:
Stylewar
Production Company:
Smuggler
Agency:
TBWAChiatDay, New York
Swedish directing collective StyleWar worked with The Mill to deftly meld the surreal with reality in 'Bees' where, thanks to Nextel's GPS technology, besuited office workers buzz about at great speed, their limbs a blur of movement. While in 'Ants', teams of builders swarm like ants up and around a building site using their mobile phones to both communicate and manage stock.
Intensive pre- and post production work delivered the ambitious scale and nature of the effects. For 'Ants', The Mill created a busy building site with hundreds of ant-like workers. Digital CG characters were composited into the live action to bulk out the numbers. To make the workers appear to do the impossible, such as walking up a vertical building, actors were filmed against a blue screen and the actions, matted and rotated in Flame, were then composited back into the live action. Vari-speeding the sequences gave the workers a speedier ant-like motion. Large digital props, such as a bulldozer, were built in 3D and tracked onto some of the workers so they seem able, like an ant, to carry objects that are massive relative to their size. For the end shot, The Mill pieced together a location still by layering 2D and 3D elements.
Agency: TBWAChiatDay, New York
Producer: Ozzie Spenningsby
Creative Director: Gerry Graf
Creative: Joel Rodriguez
Production Company: Smuggler
Director: Stylewar
Executive Producer: Allison Kunzman
Director of Photography: Joe Desalvo
Editing Company: MacKenzie Cutler
Editor: Jun Diaz
VFX & Design: The Mill
Executive Producer: Hitesh Patel
VFX Producers: Verity Grantham, Jo Arghiris
3D Lead Artists: Ben Smith, Dadi Einarsson, Rob Petrie
2D Artists: Angus Kneale, Jamie Scott, Dave Parker, Ian Plumb, Dirk Greene, Ben Turner, Tara DeMarco, Richard De Carteret
Assists: Anu Nagaraj, Andi Dorfan