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 communicate and to manage stock.
Intensive pre- and post production work delivered the ambitious scale and nature of the effects. For 'Bees', Stylewar and The Mill's Flame team motion-blurred the actors' limbs by suspending each one against a blue screen and filming them moving just their arms and legs at one frame per second, so that a sharper head and torso could be combined with the motion blur. Texture plates of the actors were also shot for reference when recreating CG digital characters for the more complex shots. The most difficult Flame work was in the transitions from flying to landing and vice versa, which involved combining and animating multiple plates. All bees in the end shot of a hive-shaped office building are entirely CG, created using particle animation and a custom flocking tool written by The Mill London.
Agency: TBWAChiatDay, New York
Producer: Ozzie Spenningsby
Creatives: Joel Rodriguez
Production Company: Smuggler
Director: Stylewar
Producer: Allison Kunzman
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