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Friday, 20 July 2007 | Levent OZLER
Hornet's Archer Beck Directs Live Earth Short Film
 Archer Beck LiveEarth.mov ( 21MB ) - Viewed 165 times
Hornet directors Archer$Beck recently completed a surreal short film to promote Al Gore's Live Earth concert series. Using their trademark rotoscope technique, the team created a dreamlike world to illustrate the perils of global warming. Live Earth, a 24-hour, 7-continent series, brought together more than 100 music artists and 2 billion people to trigger a global movement to solve the climate crisis. The film by Archer$Beck aired on July 7, 2007, the same day as the festival.
Texas natives Jason Archer and Paul Beck were given total creative control over the project, developing the script and characters from scratch. A boy falls asleep in his bed and proceeds to dream about a character: Earth - it has the body of a man and the planet Earth as its head. Dream turns to nightmare as the Earth character takes a beating from various environmental threats: His head catches on fire; a car's exhaust sends him into a coughing fit; he gets attacked by a swarm of mosquitoes and a flood sends him climbing up a tree.
Archer$Beck organized the live action shoots with an actor in the role of Earth. They then digitally painted over the live action footage to arrive at the surreal quality they're known for from their Richard Linklater films, "Waking Life" and "A Scanner Darkly." In the past, they relied on actors to serve as primary guides for the rotoscoped animation, but this time they scripted the Earth character's actions in advance and then directed the actor to perform specific movements.
"We had him get into character and act like he was being attacked by mosquitoes, coughing up a factory, or acting like his head was on fire," Beck said. "It was like a Charlie Chaplin film."
Most of the film was rotoscoped and painted, but not all it, thus one of their challenges was making sure the 2D and 3D looks were compatible. In the final scene, for example, the Earth character takes a boat across an ocean of water. While the water was rendered in 3D, the boat was shot live and later rotoscoped. "We shot the boat on a lake, so we had to make sure that the 3D water that we brought in matched how the boat drifted and floated," Archer explained.
To further build on the surreal quality, Archer$Beck used another trademark of theirs: continuous shots. "I've always been captivated by long, continuous shots and the way they unravel without edits or cuts," Archer said. "In a lot of our work in the past we've gone from one scene to another in fluid transitions."
Produced by: Super!Alright!
Tools used: Flash, Anime Studio, After Effects, Maya, Final Cut
Hornet
Hornet focuses on finding, developing, and supporting great talent, and looks across a range of industries for people with exceptional creative capacity. Through this director-driven approach, Hornet has been able to assemble a talented and diverse team of directors, each contributing a unique style and vision.
Hornet: http://www.dexigner.com/directory/detail/7828.html
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