Show how the world began and evolved in 60 seconds. That was the challenge put to director Sean Thonson of MJZ and visual effects house Asylum for the :60 HD spot “The Finishing Touch” via agency Cramer-Krasselt in Chicago. With footage shot on location, and stock footage, used essentially just for background plates, it was up to Asylum to show the evolution of the earth in CG.

The scene starts underwater with a growing volcano that bursts through the surface of the ocean, forms a rocky island that, over time, spawns vegetation of all kinds to create an island paradise where two lucky vacationers are enjoying a couple Coronas.

“It was an unusual project in that there were so many ways to skin the cat and so many different approaches we had to take,” relates John Fragomeni, VFX supervisor. “On something like this there’s no one approach you can apply throughout. Every single shot had its own characteristic. Even on something specific like the roots growing we had to take different approaches for each different shot.”

Right away, Asylum knew a big CG challenge was going to be creating the smoke pluming out of the water.

“The smoke was a big part of the story and smoke is very difficult to make look photo-real, especially when the smoke goes from so far away to so close to camera,” explains CG Supervisor Jonah Hall. “Inherently it is hard to create CG smoke because you are dealing with this infinitely dense matter that doesn’t have a surface and catches light in a particular way. It’s a pretty lengthy process any time you do it but it is compounded by the fact that you are dealing with a funnel that starts at a distance of about a mile away and then the smoke punches through camera and you are supposed to maintain the photo real look throughout.”

After some struggling, they decided on splitting the smoke up into three sections: near, mid and far. A common method for creating the smoke was established and the artists worked on creating the different layers within the same shot. Then each layer was modified so that more detail was added to the smoke in the foreground and the distant smoke was optimized for rendering. Then there was rather arduous process of compositing the three layers of smoke so the borders did not overlap.

The smoke, along with the prehistoric fish in the opening shot, was created with Autodesk Maya.

“It’s funny, most people when they render use secondary renderers, but for the smoke we just used a volume renderer that comes with Maya,” notes Hall.

While the fish and the smoke were created in Maya, that was the end of it as the main CG tool. With so many different CG elements to be handled, altered, managed, manipulated, tweaked and revised, they switched to Houdini for greater flexibility.

“The rule of thumb for trying to determine which CG package to use is that when you create a single object that moves around, well then you can use any CG tool,” Hall explains. “But when you make something that has to turn into something else, now you’re not just creating data but you are managing it and altering it. So you leave the world of just playing with 3D software and you are entering programming. Houdini is more than just CG software, it’s really a programming environment. So especially with the plants and the rock bits and grass, anything that was growing had to be done with Houdini because you are dealing with so much low-level data manipulation.

“For instance, we didn’t model the palm trees; we scripted a palm-tree system. Then through that we could add as many palm trees as we wanted. If this spot had five times as many palm tress we could have just as easily done it because we had the network built that constructed them for us with each one being unique with different fronds and different lengths and heights and bends that react to the wind slightly different and have variations in the color of the bark. But no matter how much intricate behavior we added onto these palm tress it never got difficult to work with and it always reacted properly.”

The most difficult series of shots was not those of the smoke plume but rather the roots growing out from the ground.

“We had to accomplish two things with the roots: that they were growing out across the rocks and at the same time they are aging,” says Fragomeni. “So we ended up putting a lot of pressure on out matte painters to provide us with options. That’s when we found this method of combining CG with the matte paintings to get what we wanted.”

Inferno and Flame was used for most of the compositing on the job, however Shake artists were asked to handle a bulk of the work on the roots.

“The roots were very difficult,” says Hall. “We wanted to paint the gnarled textures on the roots but mathematically something that grows like a branch and splits off and ages all at the same time is enormously difficult to do. So what we did is did a first pass. Then we had a little pipeline set up where we would render it, pass it off to a Shake artist and a matte painter who would work together. It was kind of an interesting and new process for us. We had a combination that involved how UV’s a mapped onto CG objects. We had a combination of three things all happening at the same time that would be dealt with in a different process: If the branch was skinny and a certain number of inches away from the trunk then it switches over to one matting process; if it was the main trunk it was another process; and if it was one of those joints where the roots branch out then you are in an entirely different system. So the matte painters had to provide imagery for the roots, the bumps in the roots, the specularity to the shine, everything for all three of these aspects. So it got labor intensive to say the least.”

And while lengthy process suited some of the shots it still was not working for the shot of the roots cascading down over the cavern while the light is moving ‘ a shot complicated by because the background stock footage and so Asylum did not have any of the data it normally taken on set when supervising the effects.

“A shot like that cliff shot is very difficult to do because all you have is information about the lens.” Hall explains. “What made that shot so tricky is the location of the sun and how it rakes the face of the cliff. We worked on it forever and played with the lighting. If we moved our digital sun 2-degrees to the west the CG roots did not sit against the rocks properly and you could not figure out why. It was such a subtle thing, but it did just enough to make the whole thing look wrong. So we racked our brains and eventually we used a combination of six renders and a lot of handwork. We just rolled up our sleeves and decided to spend like 20 hours in the Inferno and use a bright bit from this one, and a shadow from that one. That was the one shot that we had to do the old fashioned way.”

Asylum also seamlessly transitioned from an in-camera crane shot to a completely CG shot for the shot when the camera pulls back over the sand as the shadows of the palm trees grow.

“That shot was a CG rebuild,” relates Hall. “The problem was that we just weren’t getting high enough. They shot it with a boom that only went 16 feet up and Sean really wanted it 100 feet up. The original shot is about 5 seconds long. We used the first two seconds of the camera move and then we blended into a CG camera over the second and third seconds and from seconds three to five it was all CG. We took a projected component of the plate and handed it to our matte painting department and extended the landscape outward so that when we backed the camera up there would be sand. Then we added the waterline.”

And while Asylum dealt with creating all these different CG elements, it also had to create, and fit all those elements into, the feel of rapid, frenetic time-lapse.

“I wanted to create a very staccato feel instead of being very smooth and seamless. It was the beginning of a piece of earth, so [director Sean Thonson] and I wanted it to feel a little edgy and raw,” says Fragomeni. “Time lapse by nature is very even and we wanted this staccato feel to draw your attention to the subject, like the succulents, or palm trees or vines. What we did is a luminance flicker so we evaluated the luminance of the CG and in compositing we did a luminance flicker over the top of it so the attention was brought to the subject rather than the background.”

In addition to these techniques, Asylum dropped frames to make the some footage look more frenetic and stitched different shots, especially of the skies, together. But then they had to make the movement in background plates fit in with that in the CG.

“The whole time-lapse issue was a very big one during the duration of this project,” notes Hall. “Just a couple shots in this project were completely CG, a large amount were shot on location and we had a good amount of stock footage as well. Some of it was shot high-speed, some wasn’t. Our challenge was to take all this footage and make it sort of like it was time lapsed and make all the other elements fit within that feel. So first we would go though and make [the CG] look very time-lapsed and then we would look at it against the background. We realized it looked inappropriate. So we had to scale back the time-lapse aspect of it and just make look like it was growing very fast but in real time. And sometimes we had to find a mix between those two directions.”

In addition to Houdini, Maya, Inferno, Flame and Shake, Asylum used SynthEyes and 3D-Equalizer for tracking and Maxon BodyPaint and Adobe Photoshop for texture painting.