Rushes Scoop Gold Medal At New York Festivals

Rushes have announced a Gold Medal win at this year's New York Festivals innovative Advertising Awards.
The Awards Gala, held on April 18 in New York, saw the London post house scoop top prize in the 'Best Place-Based Media' category.
Rushes' Motion Graphics department collaborated with Creative Director Andrew Smith of A-Vision on this breakthrough use of the digital escalator panels currently being deployed throughout the London underground network.
Sony followed their television advertising work for Sony Bravia with site-specific advertising through CBS Outdoor using the escalator screens at Tottenham Court Road Underground station in London.
The iconic bouncing balls move between the screens in slow progression followed by a torrent of balls, mirroring the original television campaign.
Andrew Smith, Creative Director, at A-Vision, said: "The key to outdoor digital lies in understanding how people consume the messages, where they are consuming them and what state of mind they may be in.
"Commuters on the Tube don't want to be sold to, they want to be stimulated, entertained or wowed. The Sony Bravia campaign achieves all of these."
Rushes' Animator Lee Tibbetts was supplied reference of the original commercial and created patterned balls to match those in the original commercial. Dynamics were set up for the balls to create a realistic movement and then the positioning of the screens on the escalator matched to camera positions so that the animation continued between screens.
The balls were animated in Maya and rendered in Renderman where the motion, blur, intensity and look of the balls could be controlled to give the best result for the escalator screens.
Rushes' Motion GFX designer and compositor Matt Lawrence used After Effects to manipulate stills of a Sony Bravia set to create an end move that matched the original commercial.
Matt then composited type, footage and extraneous balls to each of the screens. The sequences were encoded at Rushes and supplied to CBS Outdoor for transmission.
The site-specific advertising ran at Tottenham Court Road Tube station from March 1 2007.
The winners can be viewed at: www.newyorkfestivals.com.
More information about Rushes' Motion GFX and the Rushes team can be found at: www.rushes.co.uk.
(KMcA/JM)