January 19th, 2009
PepsiCo sports drink Gatorade had just signed football player Mikael Forssell to their team of athletes and W.Steinmann created an idea for a campaign that would illustrate the superiority of Gatorade compared to regular water in a powerful way. Producer Mitro Puttonen of Kustom Photoproductions contacted Piñata to take part in the production that would require a group of athletes made solely out of water.
We knew right away this would be a rather challenging task and wanted to employ the best possible talent for the job. Olli and Sami Sorjonen are a couple of 3D artists who really know their way around characters and sculpting, to name a few things. "Some of us had worked with the Sorjonen brothers before and we at Piñata had just been waiting for the right project to come along.", says Rami Riihijärvi. "Basically these guys kick ass in all three dimensions and we were really anxious to do a project together."
Work of Olli Sorjonen http://www.cgmill.com
The production schedule was well planned and we had enough time to design and execute our CGI work. Since photographer Mikko Harma shot the elements in several locations - the factory in Billnäs, the stadium in Hannover and Mikael Forssell in a studio - producer Mitro Puttonen had made careful arrangements so everything would fall in place at the end. "Some things, such as the all-so-rare Mid-November snowfall in Hannover, you just can't plan for.", says Mitro. "Luckily I knew retouch artist Asko Roine is used to working his way around tight corners."
The one thing even Mitro couldn't control
Mikko and the guys did a brilliant job at the shoot and we got all the backgrounds, environment domes and measurements we could hope for our CGI work. "With all the needed elements neatly at hand, the 3D scene set up was a breeze.", says Rami. "Once we got the first poses in the scene it was evident things were working out just as we had planned. Techically everything was in the right place and we could now concentrate in making the water characters work for the picture."
In the end, quite a lot of the CGI production time was used to test different poses and combinations of runners. Mikko had shot such great water splash footage at the shoot, that the Sorjonen brothers didn't have to do as much sculpting as we had first planned. Most of the smaller water splashes and spray were composited by Asko Roine on basis of the photographed material.
Rami and Tuomas Korpi composited the rendered water athletes and Asko used the composition as a part of the retouch process. "I rendered a lot of different kinds of water which was used to create the final look.", says Rami. "Thicker human-scale pieces of water tend to look too glass-like unless you twist things around a little. It's not like you see water in this form ever in real life, so it's all about catching the image in the viewer's head instead of trying to imitate reality."
Credits
Client: GatoradeAgency: W.Steinmann
Creatives: Petteri Tyynelä, Sebastian Hurmerinta, Konsta Klemetti
Customer Manager: Mirva Kaitila
Producer: Mitro Puttonen / Kustom
Photographer: Mikko Harma
Assistant: Jari Hämäläinen
Retouch: Asko Roine / Studio Pluto
CGI: Piñata, Olli & Sami Sorjonen