BEHIND THE SCENES

This is how the projects starts, with a brief from the agency:

To help the client understand how I see the agency boards coming to life, I present storyboards back showing the shots I see best telling their story:

Once awarded, the 1st step is a crude text/timing edit to plot out a rough idea of shots and shot lengths:

After that, an animatic is put together to show basic camera angles and camera movement.  This project was on an extremely accelerated schedule so I whipped this animatic together on the plane while en route to the casino in Oklahoma.  Usually these look far more refined.  It’s incredibly  important to have this sort of visual reference on the tech scout to show the DP and gaffer exactly what the shots are going to be so I’d rather have a crude animatic than no animatic at all:

At the tech scout, I crudely shot the boards to continue to get a sense of timing, pace and the rhythm of the spot:

While on location in OK, the design studio back in Los Angeles was working on dialing in the character designs.  Here is a look at some of the exploration:

A look at the faces  that get mapped onto the card heads for sync dialogue:

A look at the CG elements of shot 7 before composite.  You can see the shot has been fed the tracking data from the live action plate – generating a matching camera move:

This is what some of the rigging of one of the characters looked like: