Rushes Complete Sky Poker.com Idents

Rushes have recently completed two, fifteen second sponsorship idents for Sky Poker.com, the Sky channel and associated website.
The idents depict the hero, a regular guy, playing Sky Poker on his laptop and as he does his environment is dismantled by the Sky Poker crew ultimately immersing him in the world of Sky Poker.
Working closely with agency Brothers and Sisters and director Katie Dawson, Rushes� 3D animator Andy Hargreaves constructed a detailed previsualisation of the commercial ahead of the actual shoot. The previs was built in such a way that fairly accurate measurements could be extracted from it and reproduced in the studio ensuring that a fairly complex idea could be broken down into its component parts and seamlessly reassembled later.
All of the live action elements were shot individually against green screen using a motion control rig, whilst locked off HD back plates were shot for each of the three locations. These locations were then entirely rebuilt in 3D with Maya, using the location shoots as reference for lighting, textures, composition and dimensions.
The motion control move was then tracked using Boujou, the resulting virtual camera placed into the CG environments and the 15-second sequences rendered out. These sequences were then used as projected textures on both the live action boards and the CG boards being manipulated by the Sky Poker crew. Rebuilding the environments in this way enabled us to create the optical illusion that the hero is actually sitting in a 3D environment, but which is then revealed to apparently be "painted" onto flat boards.
Once all of the 3D elements had been rendered out, VFX artists Brian Carbin and Adam Watson had the massive job of compositing the huge number of elements together. In addition, they also added layers of shadow, reflections, occlusion passes and subtle depth of field in order to seamlessly combine all of the live action and CG.
This complex job was turned around in a very short space of time, creating a highly polished, original and unique set of idents which everyone was delighted with.
(SP)