VTR and The Hive post Kasabian’s latest promo

Full-service facility VTR and its subsidiary The Hive have completed CGI and compositing work on the promo for Kasabian’s forthcoming single, 'Cutt Off'.
VTR was approached by production company Cops and Robbers with the idea of depicting a shark attacking people on the streets of New York. To ensure that VTR and The Hive’s Maya team had everything they needed to complete the job James Allen, flame operator at VTR, was on hand during filming on location in New York to oversee the shots.
“Cutt Off was a very ambitious project. Because of the short turnaround time of two weeks, I sent digital stills back from location so that the guys here could crack on with the project,” said Allen, who headed up the compositing side of the project.
All the 3D work was planned and scheduled by The Hive’s Christian Anderson, senior Maya animator, who spent around two weeks modelling, texturing and rigging the 3D shark featured in the promo. It was then tracked, lit and animated to fit the scene. Christian worked closely with senior Maya operator Martin Allan, in order to create the realistic finish seen on the final work.
Allan said: “I researched the great white shark to get a solid understanding of how it looked and behaved. Directors, Simon and Jon at Cops & Robbers had done storyboards for the promo which helped when it came to planning the 3D work. Also, James Allen's work and planning during the filming in New York was a great help."
Anderson added: “At first a lot of the shark material was intended to be live footage, but the mix between live and 3D did not match very well, so what you see in the final cut is entirely 3D. Simon and Jon wanted the shark to be big and dangerous, so we ended up making it very large.”
In all, Anderson and Allan had roughly nine days to track, animate and render 14 shots of varied difficulty.
“We were working to a really tight deadline, and it was the good planning and preparations that made it possible to finish the shots. Making the shark’s mouth look real in close-up during such a short space of time proved a challenge. However, good textures and clever lighting helped achieve this,” continued Anderson.
Once the CG shark was created, it was composited in flame and inferno by James Allen and a team of four flame and inferno operators.
(GB)