It’s come a long way since the days of Morph. This series of spots by Australian Director Liz Murphy and Taxi look more like CGIs at first glance, but were in fact built using real props and shot on full scale sets. Liz Murphy explains:
“We used the new Dragon Stop Motion software to capture all the imagessaved us so much timeand used two Canon 1D MkIIIs and a Canon 40D. Since both have live view features, we could onion skin really easily between previous frames, and frames about to be taken. This made moving the camera far more achievable, and prevented making major mistakes as there wasnt much chance of going backwards once we started doing some major dismantling and camera movement. The car and building spots were shot in reverse…
The camera movement was pre-plotted with hundreds of meters of measuring tape on the floor, on set walls and on a variety of portable stands. Each camera and dolly or crane had a minimum of three lasers measuring tiny increments of camera movement on up to 5 axes at once throughout each setsometimes moving the camera less than one millimeter per frame.
Each animator was permanently armed with a ruler and calculator to plot and co-ordinate the movement of thousands of objects in tiny increments throughout the sets. A small army of over 25 animators, 10 technical crew manning laptops and cameras worked on the 3 commercials, plus three mechanics who were on hand when the car was shot being dismantled.”
Pretty impressive, made even more so when you consider they are selling insurance!
Building
Contents
Motor