Mill NY creates human bees and ants for Nextel

Nextel’s campaign, devised by TBWA Chiat Day in New York, shows how their expertise in communications can improve the work day by imbuing us with the "military efficiency" of nature’s workers - bees and ants.
In 'Bees', office workers buzz around moving their limbs so fast that they are blurred. It transpires that Nextel’s GPS cellphone device has speeded them up – a competitive advantage that secures an important property deal.
Similarly, 'Ants' illustrates how Nextel’s communications solutions have united an enormous team of builders so that they operate with the precise mass coordination of a colony of ants to deliver a huge building in a short space of time.
The spots required intense pre-production and post-production to achieve the required scale and nature of the effects used in the two spots.
Bees necessitated pre-shoot tests to determine whether the team’s chosen approach would work. As predicted by Stylewar and The Mill’s Flame team the best way to achieve the blurred look of limbs was to suspend each individual actor on wires against blue screen and then shoot them, moving just their legs and arms, at one frame per second. This provided a successful motion blurred look on the limbs combined with a sharper body.
Plates were covered off that mimicked the test set-ups specifically for storyboarded shots. Texture plates of the actors were also shot so that they could be used as reference when recreating CG digital characters for the more complex shots. These 2D and 3D elements were combined in Flame to seamlessly integrate both approaches.
All bees in the end hive/office shot are entirely CG, created using a mixture of particle animation and a custom flocking tool written by The Mill in London.
In Ants, the biggest challenge for The Mill came from populating a near empty building site with hundreds of ant-like workers. This was done in two ways: firstly, as digital characters that were created in CG and composited into the live action to bulk out the apparent volume of people; and secondly, for shots where the workers appear to be doing impossible tasks, such as effortlessly climbing up the sides of buildings, actors were shot against blue screen. These actions were matted and rotated in Flame in preparation for compositing them back into the live action. These sequences were then varisped in Flame to give the workers a speedier, more ant-like movement. Large digital props, such as a bulldozer, were built in 3D and tracked onto some of the workers to give the impression they could carry massive objects, in the same way ants can.
Finally, The Mill pieced together the end shot using a still of the actual location by building up layers of both 2D and 3D elements.
(GB)