Shot on RedOne by DoP Henrik Gyllensköld, directed by Alex Brügge and produced by Olof Barr.
With a tight schedual Esteban decided to try the RedOne for its first time. With close collaboration with Stopp prior the shoot we planed everything to go as smooth as possible.
Stopp helped Esteban to prepare the Offline in FinalCut from Prores-files.
After two days of editing, Esteban sent an EDL straight after Offline-approval and before they could even get to Stopp we had the whole job conformed in our Resolve, direct from R3D! No conversion needed!

The grading took a few hours and the next morning the finished the online at Stopp with Andreas Eidhagen in our FinalCutPro online-suite.
The final spot will soon be in a commercial break near you.

The production was under extreme short timeframe, so every step from the pre-production was supervised by Stopp VFX team.
Due to the limit of time Stopp’s facility with all in house was crucial for the delivery to happen in time. Also our knowledge of productions for
Interactive campaigns helped to give North Kingdom all the required elements for the site.

Grading:

The production was shot on 35mm film. One-light was done to files for North Kingdom and Editorial so all could access the footage for
a overview of all the shots.
The campaign contained aprox 25min of selected footage that was graded with DaVinci’s Resolve, with the power of non linear grading Stopp’s
colourist did the all grading in less than 8 hours!

VFX:

Stopp’s VFX team with both 3D and 2D took care of all the effect shots, and lots of elements for the interactive part. For the whole process our Finalcut Suite
was used to make sure all edit / elements was exported with right names to make sure North Kingdom’s WEB team got all the shoots in the right format.

Sound:

Extensive sound design was done to the project, even here to the extend of creativity. Our sound designer rigged a special rig with 7 microphones what could
record a simulated surround sound.

Finishing 19 minutes of material for WEB, 9 TV commercial and 2 Cinema commercials in less than 10 days would not been possible without having all
in one place.

The location of each person visiting the website is registered and the spreading of the awareness / malaria is shown on the map. The visitors are welcomed by a not very reassuring message notifying them that they have got malaria and they should proceed if they want to cure themselves or someone else by making a donation. Donations can be also made by sending an SMS to a short number.

Banners and ads on the main swedish newspapers provided the first critical mass of users during the first days of the campaign. To spread the message on, we integrated Facebook and Twitter, and produced a badge that users can add to their own blog.

Just on the first day we had 84000 visits, of which 75000 unique. The infection is spreading.

Participate by submitting a proposal for the best idea for a new animated Red Bull commercials.
The winner will be produced! ...and yes, Stopp produced the site. The expected amount of contributions was reached during the second week online!

The concept Saatchi created gave us the chance to produce our first banner with a big sausage in it!
Verum good! Sausage bad! (For your stomach, at least). Thanks Paula and Lisa for all the funny e-mails!

DDB and Stopp created a campaign site for Cirkus Cirkörs new show called Inside out. The concept is a heart in a not defined environment. All content on the site is placed on blood bags attached to the pumping heart.I you don’t interact on the site, the heart stroke will start to increase, and eventually create a heart attack. If so, the user has to start up the heart again by spread the site, either through a TAF or via facebook and other social medias.

The show will go on an European tour 2009, and continue to the US in 2010.

Compositing for this particular project was as crucial as it was extensive, with a firm goal to tie all the elements seamlessly together. The compositing team led by Johan Boije made sure all filmed elements would fit into the old plates that were provided, matching every shake, colour, film-quality, light and grain.
The 3D team collaborated side by side with the compositing team working out all shots where 3d-tracking was needed, rebuilding existing sets and refining camera movements. A few shots involved very specific, art directed 3d particles as well as a complete remake of the x2000 train which was to be used in several shots. Further on the 3d team made sure to provide compositing with background elements such as the establishing shot, the inside of the railway station, the environments surrounding the train and the art directed end shot.

The whole site builds up on the sparkling trail of a cork shot from a Camitz bottle. When navigating a new section, the whole site moves to the position that section was created by the cork. This way the intro becomes a functional part of the site and not mere eye-candy.
Images are brought in and out by a cloud of sparkles, generated by our own particle-engine.

The pyramid interface was created with a custom 3D engine written in AS 2.0.
In the e-mail campaign the visitor can register and invite people to a competition through their e-mail address. The more people the user and its friends invite to the site, the more points he gets. Like in a pyramid-marketing model.

Check it out!

The Stopp Fx Team Supervised the shoot in Oslo, a static train car with blue screen
was used for the interior action. Outside plates were shot to composite in the windows of the train.
CG falling snow was added later at Stopp, and Fido Film provided CG for animals in the spot.

In the "Barnen spot", a two year old boy standing next to his baby brother, takes his pacifier out of his mouth and throws it to his younger brother who is crying. The baby brother stops crying and falls asleep.
The shot was accomplished by taking two different shots of the boys compositing them together, then animating the pacifier to make it look like it was one fluid move.

We also did the animation in the pack shot.

Crawford was born in Scottland 1972 and his last employer was Vendetta Post in Santa Monica, USA. Some of his earlier employments have been at Rushes, VTR and Glassworks.

Stopp VFX department was called upon in order to help recreate scenes of great magnitude but also to further push and refine the filmed material in order for it to fully have an impact on the viewer as the directors imagined. Among the effects created was the initial scene of a massive graveyard, completed with help of matte painting and 3d graphics. Further more the VFX department composited several filmed passes for the truck-sequence into one seamless shot and elaborated numerous details in other shots in order to enhance their final visual impact.

To obviate the impossibility of doing a full blown-out 3D production which a project of this scale wouldn't allow, we faked a three-dimensional transformation with 2d techniques. By streaming the content on external servers we also managed to substantially increase the quality of the final product.

The first commercial entitled “Small World” is a conscience awakening spot that shows a couple lying in their bed in Sweden awoken by the sounds of war. Parallel to this are scenes of war with all the horrors that it entails. The strapline says “The World is getting smaller. Learn more about the New Swedish Armed Forces”. The second spot entitled “Africa” shows a truck full of people navigating a street somewhere in Africa, which is full of arms dealers and gun toting men looking menacingly at them. The tension mounts until the truck passes through a checkpoint manned by Swedish army soldiers and the scene cuts to the people from the truck voting in a hut. The strapline says “A changed World demands a new Swedish armed forces. A new kind of soldier.”

The spots were shot over four days on location in Cape Town, South Africa. All casting was done in South Africa and real Swedish army soldiers were used. The commercials were shot on film and then transferred to HD by Stopp. Before embarking on the shoot, director Lööf did a lot of research to re-create the authentic scenes. He wanted to produce a look that was more like a documentary than feature film. Stopp’s Linus Eriksson Berggren did the on-line, working closely with Lööf to produce the look and feel he wanted by creating the atmospheric grading, cleaning up the shots and doing the seamless compositing. Some of the scenes required explosions which Eriksson Berggren created by shaking the picture and he added smoke to produce the gunfire. Stopp’s 3D animator Arvid built the helicopter in 3D, based on Ridley Scott’s feature film Black Hawn Down.

The first commercial entitled “Small World” is a conscience awakening spot that shows a couple lying in their bed in Sweden awoken by the sounds of war. Parallel to this are scenes of war with all the horrors that it entails. The strapline says “The World is getting smaller. Learn more about the New Swedish Armed Forces”. The second spot entitled “Africa” shows a truck full of people navigating a street somewhere in Africa, which is full of arms dealers and gun toting men looking menacingly at them. The tension mounts until the truck passes through a checkpoint manned by Swedish army soldiers and the scene cuts to the people from the truck voting in a hut. The strapline says “A changed World demands a new Swedish armed forces. A new kind of soldier.”

The spots were shot over four days on location in Cape Town, South Africa. All casting was done in South Africa and real Swedish army soldiers were used. The commercials were shot on film and then transferred to HD by Stopp. Before embarking on the shoot, director Lööf did a lot of research to re-create the authentic scenes. He wanted to produce a look that was more like a documentary than feature film. Stopp’s Linus Eriksson Berggren did the on-line, working closely with Lööf to produce the look and feel he wanted by creating the atmospheric grading, cleaning up the shots and doing the seamless compositing. Some of the scenes required explosions which Eriksson Berggren created by shaking the picture and he added smoke to produce the gunfire. Stopp’s 3D animator Arvid built the helicopter in 3D, based on Ridley Scott’s feature film Black Hawn Down.

The spot aims to promote this by showing the problems one can face when choosing the wrong mortgage lender. It features a woman watching TV in the comfort of her home and this calm scene is disrupted by a purple ghost appearing, causing havoc and eating her money. The ghost represents the many ‘too good to be true’ offers that are regularly promoted by some mortgage lenders.

Director Kouthoofd has worked extensively at Stopp recently and knew they could deliver the 80’s film look he wanted. Stopp’s Johan Boije and Peter Marin watched the old Ghostbusters films and studied early copies of Cinefex to ensure authenticity and recreated number of techniques used in the 80’s. Boije comments, “It’s fun to see the effects that you remembered to be really cool, now they seem to be quite crude. At that time digital effects were limited and a lot of effects were optical or solved ‘in camera’”. Kouthoofd chose to build the monster as a real model and not in 3D because that is how they did it in the 80’s. It had a puppeteer controlling it from inside. This was filmed against black and then composited with a simple additive lumakey and a touch of glow on top of that.

More work was done on the two miniature models. Boije had to do sky replacements as Kouthoofd wanted the first to have a twilight look and the other a late at night one. They added tree branches in the foreground and time warped the original smoke to make it look more realistic. A flock of birds was made out of particles in the first shot and some bats in the other one. The letter that flies across the sky in the first shot was animated in XSI by Stefan Andersson from Stopp’s 3D department. Johan Boije and Peter Marin removed the wires that controlled the small model cars and added beams to the headlights and tracked the SBAB logo to the side of the car. Smoke generated in 3D by Arvid Björn was also added to the skidding car.

Boije tried a lot of different solutions for the capturing of the ghost sequence. Preproduction tests were carried out and the idea of sucking the ghost up like a vacuum cleaner was derived at. Boije said, “We tested different approaches on the sucking effect with particles done in 3D, various displacement effects etc. But it all looked too high-end and digital. So it ended up with simple glows and flares. The monster itself was painted and hand warped in Shake. To add to the effect we made some objects fly through the air like being pulled by the force of gravity from the ‘proton-pack’”. All effects were finished in Autodesk Flint, AfterEffects and Shake.

Stopp’s effects team supervised the 2-day shoot in Sweden to ensure that all elements would work well together. Stopp’s animators Arvid Björn and Per Bergsten created all the 3D for the spot. Arvid describes how they did this, “The original plate was shot from a helicopter in the Alps. We matched the movement of the camera relative to the mountain side so they could alter the cliffs to accommodate a tent, also to add more snow where needed. An additional mountain ridge was modelled, textured and added in the foreground to give more depth to the image as the helicopter appears to fly over it. Snow is whirling off the ridge to add a sense of atmosphere. The background sky was replaced and the far off landscape was colour corrected to match the over all mood. When the delivery man pulls his quick-release and drops down the cliff side, the camera follows the three guys from the tent as they rush to the edge to see what happened to him as he's falling down before releasing his parachute. This shot is composed from four different elements. The first, which is the foreground, was shot on location in Sweden with the actors on top of a mock-up cliff with a blue screen below on the ground. The second is an isolated mountain in the background which was shot in the Alps. The third is a mountain side which drops down and eventually joins the isolated mountain. That whole piece is a matte painting composed of a number of photos in combination with regular by-hand painting. The fourth element is the delivery man who's falling down, he was shot jumping from the helicopter in the Alps and cut out from his original background. The matte painting was projected onto geometry of the non-existing cliff-side to give it depth and perspective as the camera moves over the edge and looks down. Then the cliff was joined together with the material shot in Sweden to a single shot.” All elements were seamlessly edited together by Stopp’s senior Inferno artist Peter Marin.

These include frontal impact protection, collision warning with brake support and a personal car communicator. The film centres on western architects navigating, what is for them, alien streets of Shanghai in their Volvo S80. It shows how the car’s new features help them to keep out of trouble and get them to their all important meeting just in time.

Stopp’s TK department transferred the film to High Definition and then senior inferno artist Peter Marin took over, tweaking the grades, replacing backgrounds and skilfully re-creating the dashboard of the car. As he explains, “The real car hadn’t been completed when the commercial was shot so we had to produce some of the features on the dashboard. Some of the old gadgets had to be replaced and I made the lights flash on the new ones, including the blind spot indicator.” The architects were originally shot against green screen, so Marin had to composite them into the car. He worked closely with Stopp’s 3D department to produce a number of elements such as the brush metal window frames in the boardroom and the reflections on the glass.

Director Adam Berg wanted the spot to be shot at night but he also needed it to have a very bright "long exposure" look, thus giving everybody a reason to wear sunglasses at night. In addition to that, Berg wanted to place the story in some undefined futuristic city with inspiration from gritty sci-fi stories like Blade Runner, Fifth Element and the works of Enki Bilal. Stopp’s 3D department designed and built matte paintings for the outside shots and assistants rotoscoped extensively.

Shooting took place in London during two very long nights. Stopp’s head of 3D, Stefan Andersson attended the shoot to guide the team and make sure they got the takes they required. It involved motion control and multiple passes. One normal exposure pass for the actors and one long exposure pass to get the bright city look. The exposure was approximately a second per frame meaning that a shot could take up to half an hour. This gave vastly different results in exposure depending on what time at night it was shot. Some of the takes shot early in the morning were unusable due to over exposure. The motion control also wasn’t very steady so the passes weren't aligned at all and they differed in exposure. On top of that the long exposure shots missed frames here and there meaning that they were not only unstable, they were also jumping in time. Plus people and lights were moving in and out of picture in some of the long exposure shots and had to be removed as well.

Stefan Andersson explains what his team did in 3D, “We built a lot of buildings and added set extensions to most of the close up scenes that are exterior shots. To help us out we borrowed Boris Nawratil from Filmtecknarna F. Animation to draw concept sketches for us. He drew the basic design and from there we extrapolated what we needed and started to build those buildings and objects in 3D. Boris made tons of drawings so we had a lot to choose from, and it made it easier for Adam Berg to see what the design would be before we started building.” Andersson continues, “The goal was to make it look futuristic and at the same time a bit industrial. So we added a lot of pipes, tubes, cables, ventilation shafts and extended all the buildings that were close to camera. I also went out with my digital camera to take reference photos of concrete and steel constructions. Those photos together with some hand painted images were then the base for the textures that were used on the models. We also built a lot of futuristic skyscrapers that were used to fill up a city skyline. This was also to add to the futuristic feel that we are in a large city in the future."

Stopp’s Peter Marin and Johan Boije led the compositing work. Boije explains what they did, “The first thing we had to do was to get all material to match up both in space, time and exposure. This involved stabilizing, warping, time warping (thank you Kronos), cleaning up, colour correcting and lots of lots of rotoscoping. This needed to be done to give our 3D department something to work with and be able to 3D track moving shots. As we got material from 3D, Peter and I started to extend and add new buildings to the outdoor scenes and we replaced the original dark skies with new hazardous orange smoggy looking ones. We used rotoshapes done by our assistants to add actors back again and worked with various light effects, flares and beams on top of it all to blend things together. It sounds easy but it wasn't. It took a lot of time to match things up and get the right overexposed look. We had to work on the transition of our main character backing into the dark, coming out as a girl. The "hero and heroine" weren't perfectly aligned when backing in and out of the room. It is important to have movement as close as possible to get a good morph. That meant both characters had to be removed and stabilized before doing the actual morph and making a clean plate. The morph was done in Shake and put over the clean plate and after that the original movement was added back to the stabilized morph”.

Suddenly he notices a bullet flying on his left side. This proves a bit of a problem when he wants to turn left onto a crossroad coming up. To avoid collision, he gradually eases the car left, opening the left hand side window to allow the bullet, which is flying straight, smooth passage through the car to the other side and out through the opened right hand window.

Swedish effects house Stopp was instrumental in achieving the overall look of “extreme dynamism performance and attitude” that the client wanted. Stopp’s VFX supervisors attended the shoot in Italy to prepare the essential groundwork and then post production was carried out back in Sweden without client attendance. Any approvals and discussions required with the client Mercurio Productions was carried out over the internet as they had absolute faith in Stopp’s 3D animator Arvid Björn comments on what they did, “It was important to find a look for the bullet flying through the air that gave the impression of speed and a sense of danger in order to reach the right look. We worked closely with the client to finalise the look, despite the distance between Milan and Stockholm. Stopp's on-set supervisors made sure the shoot went as planned from a post-production point of view and 360-degree panoramas were captured on location and used to recreate lighting and reflections later on. A number of passes for the bullet, fog, heat-haze and vapour were passed on to the compositing team.” Peter Marin Stopp’s Inferno artist and his team then comped all the CG elements seamlessly together and worked on many of the details including creating the trail effects of the bullet, retouching car reflections and removing the reflections of the van and camera crew. They also did extensive grading of the car and interiors.

The 3D team created the “Superman flying round the world” film from scratch, including building the earth, stars, clouds, van and so on. They made a matte painting of the space environment and built the earth in 3D to be able to do the massive zoom that the client wanted. The team did the zoom on the 3D Globe with about ten matte paintings projected; this allowed them to keep the high level of detail throughout the entire shot. In addition to this the team added clouds and other atmospheric effects. The zoom had to end up on an ONOFF van with the x-ray on the side of it and they therefore decided to build a part of Stockholm in full in 3D including the van, thereby enabling them to trail the van and end up looking on the side of it.

In “Catman” the 3D team added some minor details such as a car driving past on the street and the pack shot x-ray beam. In “Freeze” they built the ice cube that surrounded the woman and replicated the “Icegunray” that was shot in camera on the previous shot. They also added a lot of heavy particle effects like swirly smoke on the floor and some additional hazy smoke dissipating from the cube. 2D then rendered the elements for each commercial and joined the different camera moves together in Flame and did the final grading in Flame.

“The commercial is a follow-on from the successful print campaign that W+K/Amsterdam and Nike launched in 2005. The campaign takes an educative look at how the body works and how Nike’s holistic knowledge of anatomy allows the design of great products. In the spot, Marathon World Record holder Paul Tergat takes us on a guided tour of a virtual human body. Along the way he shows us how wearing the correct jacket can mean more time running and less urinating.”

Stefan Andersson, head of Stopp’s 3D department and Per Bergstén, Stopp’s up and coming 3D talent, created the 3D world that Paul Tergat moves around in. The models of body parts, already produced for the Nike print campaign, were photographed and then re-built in SoftimageXSI by Andersson and Bergstén. They then used special software called Z-Brush to paint and light them that ensured they looked very graphic in style. The camera was animated to make it feel like a flying micro camera. To ensure it would look like a real camera, the team specifically used a lens in 3D which had short depth of field to make the background out of focus. Tergat, who was filmed against green screen, was keyed out by Peter Marin, Stopp’s senior inferno artist so that he could then composite him into the 3D world and onto the body parts. To subtly enhance the look and feel of the spot Marin added depth by compositing many layers that the 3D team provided him with. These helped to create a photographic effect that included depth of field, a blurred background and film grain.

The on-line spot will also be shown in EMEA on TV, cinema, retail and events.

This is Ikea’s first campaign to include a full internet commercial. The campaign is called "Drömkök åt alla" ("Dreamkitchens for everyone") www.ikea.se/drömkök and consists of print and internet ads. The print ads will be placed in the national Swedish press and are to give the reader inspiration and together with the internet ads drive traffic to the campaign site.

The internet commercial is in excellent clarity and shows six kitchens in a time slice format which turn 360º. The viewer sees a glimpse of the different lifestyles that each kitchen can inspire. For example we see an older man in his classic kitchen reaching for his bottle of wine accompanied by opera music and a younger couple in a funky circular minimalist kitchen accompanied by jazz music. The viewer can click on the items shown to find out more about them.

The director Kallinggård used a Milo motion control rig to film the commercial but as the camera was very big it made it difficult to build six different kitchen sets in the studio. Kallinggård called upon the expertise of Stockholm’s leading effects house Stopp to help him re-create the kitchen sets and produce the commercial. The first thing Stopp had to do was to track the motion of the camera in order to build their own set extensions as they needed to replace the walls and the floors that were taken out of the set for the "Milo" to fit in. The Stopp 3D team rebuilt the ceiling in almost all the scenes as the spotlights couldn’t penetrate the wood and concrete and they took photos on set to get colours and textures that could be used when they made their elements in 3D. Once that was done they also needed to rebuild some of the interiors in certain shots. As the "Milo" rig was reflected onto cupboards and windows they made new ones that looked like the originals but without the reflections. Then objects were added into the air to make the time freeze effect more believable including, toast, eggs, wine bottle, lamps, confetti, champagne, foam and food. The film was shot in several passes with the Milo. Since it was a motion control rig, the camera was able to shoot the exact same sequence twice so that clean back plates could be used to paint out actors and wires. All the shots needed to be painted to remove all the lines that helped the actors to stay in place. Mattes were needed so many elements were painted out and 3D elements could be placed behind the actors or objects. The actors and objects were put back on top of the 3D elements and these were then composited together by Stopp’s senior inferno artist Peter Marin and also graded to match the tone and colour of the footage. Some of the composited elements were then used again by the 3D department to create reflections in the windows.

For further information contact Tracey la Cour + 44 (0)780 110 3602
email tracey@roarcommunication.com

Arvid Björn tells the story, “In the very first 3D shot in the film we had to alter the model to look more like a scale model toy car by giving it thicker edges and reducing the level of detail to that of the real toy car. In the shot of the car on the kitchen table viewed from outside of the kitchen, we made a 3D double of the boy's arm so it would cast reflections in the paint of the car as he reaches inside and touches the steering wheel. The kitchen shot was especially difficult as the light in the room varied substantially and gave four different sets of lighting in a single shot. We solved it by filming a chrome-sphere inside the kitchen which captured all the different kinds of light, in a single take, just slightly edited to match the timing of blinks and lamplight. We could use that material to create accurate reflections in the 3D car which matched the plate. We also measured every distance and angle inside the kitchen relative to the camera, the height and angle of the camera as well as its lens which made sure the car is placed at exactly the correct angle.”

Arvid continues, “The outdoor dolly pan is where you see the car most clearly. It fills the screen and is lit by broad daylight. The surroundings such as the trees influence the reflection in the car paint and windows. Special care was put into creating shaders that mimic the effect of a sky occluded by trees, as opposed to just reflections of trees. We took a large number of photographs at the location and measured distances seen in-camera, which was essential to recreating the dolly-pan camera movement and environment. Here we also used the chrome-sphere to capture the environment surrounding the car. The wheels were set up to rotate automatically as the car is animated driving forwards. The family in the car was filmed against a greenscreen and put in behind the glass of the car, all carefully composited in by our Inferno artist Johan Boije.”

“The last shot where the family is sitting in the car was filmed from the hood of the car and composed from three different elements. The real-life car was loaded onto a truck and the camera was secured to the hood of the car so they would move as one. Then the truck with the car on the back was driven around to catch moving reflections. The first element is an empty car with a large piece of black cloth suspended over it to cover all reflections in the glass and paint, this is the background "inside car" pass. The second element is reversed. The car is driven around with no black cloth over it, but behind the wind shield so you can't see anything but reflections in the glass, and plenty of reflections on the paint.
The last element is the family against a greenscreen in a studio environment, acting as though they were driving in a double-sized car. The three elements were composed by Johan so it looked like tiny humans driving a large car, sitting accurately on the seats, behind the glass.”

The campaign starts at the end of January 2007.