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| Could you supply a bit of background on how and when Origami Digital was started? |
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"Origami Digital, LLC was founded by Oliver Hotz in the beginning of 2004. Origami was created to give clients a new alternative to bring their projects to life. The first and foremost important thing at Origami was to create an environment in which artists could not only thrive in their creativity, but also explore new areas of production."
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| What kind of work does Origami Digital do? |
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"We do primarily commercials and feature film work, however, with the recent addition of our Motion Capture stage, we do a lot of performance capture as well. We also have recently started to produce our own content. We also do a lot of previsualization work and build a Virtual Directing Toolkit with the use of our motion capture system."
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| What is your type of customer at Origami Digital? |
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"Agencies and Production companies. We have some very strong ties with directors, that we pretty much work with on any of their projects. We have built a good reputation and usually get our work through word of mouth, which we prefer instead of advertisement."
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| Why do you think you were chosen to work on the Gatorade campaign? |
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"Due to our small size, yet highly efficient workflow, we can work a lot more dynamic and faster than bigger companies. We have proven several times in the past that we don't have to hide behind big studios and that we can do the same work, often faster, especially on commercial schedules."
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| What was the outline of the specific project? (Who was the client, what were the requirements?) |
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"The Client was Element 79 and the Production company was RSA Films. The campaign was a set of 3 commercials, each of which is about a different sport; Basketball, Volleyball and Football. Gatorade's new product is labelled "Rain", so the idea is to have Gatorade rain on the individual's sport play-ball, and the athlete is birthed."
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| What were some of the biggest challenges you faced on this project and how did you overcome them. How did Fusion help in this regard?
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"The biggest issue we had was keying the rain, and we ended up adding a lot of rain in post. The challenges were more on the 3D side than the compositing."
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| Who were the artists working on the shot? What particular features were essential in getting their work done? |
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Oliver Hotz (3D / Compositing)
Mark Wilson (3D)
Paul Kirsch (Compositing)
Rony Soussan (Compositing)
Marc Hotz (Roto / Logo Replacements)
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| Why did you choose Fusion to accomplish the shot? (If possible, can you go through portions of the project step by step with screen grabs and explanations of how Fusion was used to accomplish the final shot?) |
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"Fusion is our compositing tool of choice. I had been using Fusion pretty much since its beginning and it's what we feel most comfortable with. Its toolset is amazing and there isn't much we can't do with it. The addition to the 3D environment helped us a lot. We could create digital rain right inside of Fusion instead of having to do it in a 3D package."
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| What specific tools were used and why? How did Fusion fit into the overall production pipeline? |
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"For this particular case, we used LightWave for all the modelling/texturing/rendering and Fusion for compositing. Fusion's scripting capabilities and the ASCII format for composite files allowed us to have a lot of scripts that would automate a lot of mundane tasks. We have build a few tools to make it more customized to our workflow, but in general, we like Fusion's openness to various workflows."
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| How deadline driven was this project and how did Fusion comply and assist in this? |
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"The project had a very fast turn around, and we were playing with the look of the commercials for a while, exploring multiple options. Fusion is great through its nodal structure and allows us to make changes in a very short amount of time. We used the 3D features of Fusion a lot in these commercials, to cast shadows, 3D rain."
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| What can we expect from you in the future? |
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"We are currently working on a commercial for a new game show on television which is a fantastic idea. Unfortunately, I cannot give out much more information. Besides that, we are continuing to develop our own content for TV."
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| What was the most rewarding effect that you feel you pulled off? |
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"The most rewarding effects are always the ones that no one knows are effects. We did some great work on Aviator in some of the plane sequences which are absolutely invisible effects. The current projects we are doing, especially the mocap pipeline we have setup is probably the most rewarding work in general that we have done. It opens an entirely new way of filmmaking and you should hear a lot more about that in the very short term future."
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| Would it be possible to get more screen shots of the project, stills, before and after shots, etc? |
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"Of Course."
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| What is your favourite tool in Fusion and do you experiment with it. What have you done that you have not seen done before, something you may want to brag about? |
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"One of the projects we worked on will unfortunately never be seen, but it's probably the best work we have done to date, showing off completely digital humans in a complete digital environment. It was a commercial for a prominent sports company, and was delivered in film resolution."
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| What do you see in the future for compositing? |
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"I think you will see a lot more of the 3D world in compositing applications. You can already light/relight 3D in a compositing application, but I think that will just be more enhanced and finetuned."
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All images courtesy of Origami Digital.