Usually PSAs are rather simple talking heads fare. But the :90 spot “Burma Viral” via Ogilvy & Mather Amsterdam, MTV and The Burma Arts Board set its sights much higher and tasked creative production studio Shilo to create an epic CG spot that was photo-real, yet stylized.
The PSA was written by Carl Le Blond, executive creative director at Ogilvy & Mather Amsterdam and he turned to Shilo to produce it after seeing their short film The War.

“It was a beautifully crafted piece of writing. As far as the shot progression, that is where we picked it up. So we added to the script and developed it visually,” recalls Andre Stringer, co-founder and creative director of Shilo. “One of the things I think was really cool about the way he approached the piece and added a lot of flexibility for us is that he looked at it in more of an emotional narrative. He wanted to convey a feeling and how we got there was almost secondary and the execution was left up to us. So it was really just about how to affect people the way that the script intended.”

Shilo was entrusted to devise a look, the pace and the progression of the piece to match Le Blond’s emotional tone. While still editing the storyboard together and sketching initial drawings, the facility put great efforts into finding the right music for the piece.

“We needed music that communicated the narrative and communicated the twist of the narrative but also had the right emotional tone and gravity of the piece,” notes Shilo executive producer Trcy Chandler. “So we did a ton of research to find that until we landed on the Chopin pieces. It is actually two different Chopin tracks that are cut together and completely morphed and distorted to bring about that sense of tension and unease. We were in editorial just cutting together some of the boards and initial sketches we found the music and that helped us define the piece. From there we were able to really go ahead with the animation and drawing.”

Once the music was set, Shilo began building the project, layer by layer in a different manner than usual.

“Because this was a very stream-of-consciousness type process that we were working in we only made the decisions we needed to as we went to allow us to move on to the next step,” Chandler explains. “I think that approach allowed us flexibility to find the right solution and the right decision for each part rather than being rushed into decisions and being tied down to some arbitrary decision made early in the process. That fluidity let us do the research and build the piece as we worked on it.

Shilo set out to create a look at appeared close to photo-real, but diverting from realism enough to achieve the tone of the piece.

“There was a certain stylization that we embraced because we were really trying to set a tone so ultimately we weren’t trying to replicate reality but were designing around reality,” Stringer notes. “As soon as you acknowledge that fact ‘that you aren’t trying to exactly replicate reality ‘ then you make creative decisions based on that rather than what snow falling really looks like.”

For the opening sequence of the planes, Shilo researched photos of a variety of 20th century aircraft.

“One of the big conceptual points we were trying to show was this was a contribution from all over the world so we wanted to pick some different planes and styles and environments for the first half of the piece that showed that this was a global effort,” says Stringer. “So we looked at a lot of different planes that are either still in use or were in use during the late 20th century. But we never favored realism as much as favoring an emotional tone. So we redesigned some of the planes to mark some distinctions and difference in the planes. While we used the B52 for the basis for one of our planes we changed it to make it look a little different, more interpretive.”

The planes were modeled in Maya, Photoshop for painting and texturing, After Effects for modeling and the piece was cut with Final Cut Pro. QUBE was used to managed the renders out to Mental Ray.

A similar workflow was used to create the descending flowers, though they had to write scripts for the flowers on different levels to behave properly.

“We basically made three different types of flower systems that could be used in the various types of shots and some we used all of them in one shot,” says Stringer. “We had a high version of the flower that we modeled and had a lot of detail for the close-ups. Those have a lot of secondary animations. The rig we made was pretty cool. It had a lot of the fluttering for the petals and they bloomed at a certain point when they fell so that when we started animating all we had to do is put in a few keyframes and it did a lot of the work for us. Even the real wide shots we did with Maya particles because they ended up being faster and more representative of what we wanted. A lot of the flower look and feel was achieved in the composite, adding translucency and the semi-opaqueness.”

For snow in the beginning and the pollen at the end were both created in Trapcode Particular.

“We use Particular in a lot of our projects and this project was a culmination of a few years of using Particular and learning the program,” says Stringer.

In the end, the project wasn’t about creating cool-looking planes, dazzling flowers or dreamlike particle effects, but rather just for the cause itself.

“There’s only a few of these types of projects that come along where the people you are working with from all sides where there is so much good will and so much collaboration where everyone puts their egos aside to try to something good for the world. It was an awesome experience for us and hopefully it makes some change,” says Chandler.

Stringer adds, “We thank MTV, the people at the Burma Arts Project and Carl [Le Blond] and everyone at Ogilvy, because they were the ones that spearheaded the effort to try and help this cause.”

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