Stardust Studios:
Banking on Imagination
Live Action, Rotoscoped
“Bombay Sapphire is one of the first spots I pitched against big directors,” Banks says. “The company makes only one spot a year and usually picks a traditional, live-action director. The storyboards I presented mixed live action with animation. They had these bizarre illustrations of people walking through a city and pieces of the city attaching to them.”
Reasoning out his strategy, Banks says, “I think many people look at live action as a precious thing you can’t really mess with. We cut up the live action, rotoscoped the girl, and retimed her body parts to make the spot like a collage.”
Banks is especially proud of the spot because it’s deliberately disjointed. “When I was in art school, everything was almost overly-graphic, vector-based, and it felt very cold,” he explains. “Bombay Sapphire was all about experimenting with not being so graphically precise.”
After Banks put the edit together in Final Cut Pro for timing and the takes he planned to use, animators Sandy Chang, Shane Zucker, Christian Perez, Yan Ng, and Angie Tien used After Effects to create a free-flowing, free-form story.
“The process would be nearly impossible if it weren’t for After Effects and Mac,” Banks confesses. “Often I look at my computer and my screen with these huge projects on it. I’m animating something for a huge campaign I’m doing and I’m like, ‘I’m doing this all on a Mac with After Effects, Photoshop, Illustrator, and Final Cut Pro.’ That’s it.”
Cars as Birds
The series of spots Banks and his team created for TBWA\Chiat\Day on Nissan’s new Murano SUV took a completely different direction. One of the spots, “Glide,” aired during the mother of all commercial slots: ABC’s Super Bowl halftime show.
“Our clients at Chiat\Day came to us with an overall concept — a car with new technology that produces a very smooth ride, but they didn’t have any imagery yet,” Banks remembers. “We helped them develop the idea and the look and feel where the car turns into a manta ray in one spot, a bird in another, and an airplane in the third spot. We were going to do a surfer, but the surfer got killed.”
Crazy Camera Moves
Morphing a car into a manta ray, bird, and airplane is easier said than done. “We previsualized every single camera move in Maya for the live action before we even showed up at the location to shoot,” Banks says.
“In a CG environment, it’s really easy to do these crazy camera moves, but to mimic them when you’re shooting live action is really hard.”
With the help of photography director Neil Shapiro, Banks used a camera car and helicopter to capture the shots and get the angles necessary to match his storyboards. “We had to shoot the car in a way that would match the animation’s elements of flowing, soaring, and gliding,” he says. “Doing extreme, dynamic camera moves — we went from one side of the car, around, up over, and back — allowed us to work with the animation more freely.”
Sculpting a Bird in Maya
Banks and all of the creatives at Stardust Studios use Photoshop, Illustrator, and Cinema 4D on their Macs to design storyboards. “The thing that’s great about design today is that we can get the spot in storyboard form exactly how it’s going to look, because we have the tools right in front of us,” Banks points out. “We don’t have to try to imagine something from hand-drawn storyboards.
“We have a pretty large team, so on projects like Nissan, we can put 10 creatives on it, and they’ll all come up with a different take,” Banks adds. “That’s where most of the excitement comes in, because we go, ‘Ah, that’s a great way of thinking about it.’”
To model the 3D bird, plane, and manta ray and their fluid animation for the Nissan spots, Stardust artists worked in Maya on their Macs. Then came the transitions from the Murano into and out of the animated sequences. “The biggest thing was trying to get the actual way the bird flies and lands,” Banks recalls. “We watched a lot of clips of birds taking off, landing, and soaring just to get the movement right.”
Tools for Constant Change
Banks has always wanted to be a painter and fine artist. When he went to art school, he fell in love with design, illustration, and animation. “I remember the first thing I animated — the lensflare in After Effects. Ever since, I’ve been obsessed.”
Even though Banks’s plate is full, he says he gets a kick out of balancing four jobs at once and having teams of talented people supporting the work. “Our work is always changing,” he says. “We never want to do the same thing twice. And the tools are there. I never look at my storyboard and go, ‘Can that even be done?’ I know it can be. When I graduated from college, my first boss said to me, ‘I don’t know if we can animate that, so let’s not show it to the client.’ I said, ‘What are you talking about? We can figure out a way to do that. I can do it on a Mac.’”
