//:Commercial work for BUG

In June 2006 BUG started producing two commercials about angry lemmings that could't get technology right. The films was made for a Norwegian telecommunications company called OneCall and the client dared us be different when we wrote the idea. It was one of the most memorable commercials i have worked and it was alot of fun to make aswell.

I was responsible for all rendering, shading , effects , compositing and finalizing of the film while Aslak Helgesen did the concept drawings, animatics, modeling and texturing . Francois Laurent, Jeremy Theng, and Charles Beirnaert did the lemming animation, remodeling of the lemming, rig and lemming texture.

We worked on and off for about two months before completing the job, and was aired on Norwegian tv-stations TV-Norge, Tv3, Tv2 aswell as going nationwide on the cinema.

We used max for all the 3d stuff, along with plugins such as CAT, Pyrocluster and Ornatrix. Rendered with mental ray using custom buffers and multipass renderings, Fusion5 was used for all compositing where we used custom macros and script to complete the shots. End titling was done if After effects by Torkell Berntsen.

This is a shot from one of the comps from the first movie, alot was done in fusion for flexibilty. Almost every aspect of fusion was used to produce some of the shots, everything from doing all in 32bit with exr files to using fu's particle systems and 3d space.

Here's a typical shot-breakdown of two of the scenes, (quicktime ahead)

We got some attention from the cg-industry for the ads and I was interviewed here on CgTalk and here by Eyeon. Both films have been downloaded almost 100 000 times from our server marking the films as highly successive. Yay!

-the0