Framestore CFC – 'Dancing With Bulls'

Four weeks is a very short time indeed when you’re trying to create a photorealistic CG bull from scratch, and then teach it to dance, but that’s the brief that Framestore CFC have just delivered on for the new Audi RS6 quattro.
'Bull' was shot in Canada over five chilly nights at the beginning of September. It features some of Canada’s top rodeo talent and shows a cowboy, alone at night in a corral, pitting himself against the might of a large bull. He rides the bull as it violently tries to throw him, and finally subdues it to his will to the point where it performs the equestrian manoeuvre known as a ‘half pass’ – whereby it ‘dances’ sideways, crossing its front and back legs as it does so.
Dramatically effective (if physically impossible), the spot highlights the ‘Dynamic Ride Control’ feature of this car, and shows how great power can be controlled and chanelled. Although the CG bull features in only the last three shots of the corral footage, it had to match what preceded it in every detail for the spot to work. Framestore CFC’s track record of convincingly portraying creatures of great mass and power, in work such as ‘Dinotopia’ and ‘Walking With Beasts’, helped convince Outsider that the company would be right for the project.
The Framestore CFC team, marshalled by Producer Lara Hopkins, received the go-ahead to start work on the August 27, and started at once working from reference material, building up a basic bull. As more information about the breed arrived this model was improved. Stephane Allender flew out on September 3 and supervised the shoot for the company. He first sent back many digital snapshots of the ‘hero’ bull, so that the artists could continue to refine their model.
Five cameras were used to shoot the action sequences, generating thousands of feet of raw footage of the bulls from every conceivable angle. The result, when edited down, is a highly dynamic sequence which then slows and contrasts beautifully with the controlled power of the CG shots that conclude the piece. It was during this editing process that Virgil Manning and Sophie Lodge, CG Artists for the project, started to feed in low-res greyscale footage of the CG bull going through its animation cycle. The team were working in Softimage XSI, and were able to provide the editing team with three cameras worth of coverage of the digital creature, giving them a broader choice of material.
Once the animation had been approved, it fell to Technical Director Martin Parsons to make the muscles and the enveloping on the model bull work. This crucially helped sell the weight, the heft of the beast to the audience’s eye, as did Thomas Pastor’s sympathetic lighting.
The compositing work was done on Henry by Tim Greenwood and his team.
(GB)