Asylum Shaking Things Up for Levi's

The Asylum VFX team creates earth shaking visuals for this :30 Levi's spot directed by Smuggler's Filip Engstrom.

A man begins to pull on his brand new pair of jeans. As he pulls them half-way up, the city street below shoots up into his apartment revealing a sexy girl smiling at him from a phone booth. One more tug at the jeans and the entire city is now in his living room. He finishes buttoning his fly, walking away with the girl into the night... down the street that was once his apartment.



The Tech Details from VFX Supervisor Tim Davies
In this campaign, we had to show a cold, lifeless world that was brought to life by the very act of our hero guy pulling up his jeans. The apartment was built as a set that was raised above the ground to allow room for elements such as the phone booth, parking meters, bollards and the taxi to burst through the floor from below. Green screen was positioned outside each window, allowing us to add the city skyline and animate the rising up of the buildings at the compositing stage, as well as tracking in skylines and adding reflections back into the windows of various scenes. The phone booth scene required us to create an outside environment of the city rising up in sync with our guy lifting his jeans. This was created using a series of matte paintings separated in 3d space, a camera move was added in flame giving us the life-like parallax needed to sell it as a live action plate. Dirt, debris and dust passes were sourced as elements and added falling from the rooftops and exploding from the streets to simulate the buildings bursting through the ground in the city. For safety reasons, we shot the phone booth bursting through the floor empty. This allowed us to bring it through with some force, creating an explosive effect with floor tiles and dust flying everywhere. We then placed the girl in the booth and lifted her slowly through the now existing hole in the floor, she was then isolated, retimed and composited into the initial burst through plate. Additional repairs were needed for this scene, as lights in the phonebooth went out as it burst through the floor.



The taxi cab scene was broken down into 3 sections. The foreground elements including the taxi, furniture, staircase and flooring were filmed in-camera as practical effects. Meticulous rotoscoping was performed to lift these elements from their background and with the help of well planned dust passes, we were able to successfully composite these elements into our scene. The walls, ceiling, lamppost and telegraph pole were created entirely in CG. The crumbling walls and ceiling were animated and then enhanced with several passes of CG cement dust, chunks of concrete and crumbling particles. As no street scene was shot for this, we had to utilize what we could from the following mid shot of our hero emerging from the dust. This shot was reduced in size and extended as a matte painting, our hero was painted out, allowing us to retain him from his interior plate and then we added the traffic, pedestrians, background lights and again, more dust passes to bring this matte painting to life. Once all the effects were in place, we then balanced the color of each shot, the jeans were isolated and graded to maximize the detail, the interiors were pushed toward a monochromatic 'lifeless' tone and the outside world was warmed up as a metaphor for a much happier place to be.




Credits

Client: Levi's
Spot Title: Change
Air Date: July 2007

Agency: BBH, NY
Executive Creative Director: Kevin Roddy
Creative(s): Maja Fernqvist, Joakim Saul
Group Account Director: Jenifer Wellig
Account Director: Mary Ferris
Business Director: Julia Torres
Producer: Katherine Cheng

Prod Company: Smuggler
Director: Filip Engstrom
Head(s) of Production: Laura Thoel, Allison Kunzman
EP(s): Patrick Milling Smith, Brian Carmody
Producer: Paul Ure

Post/Effects: Asylum
VFX Supervisor: Tim Davies
CG Supervisor: Jason Schugardt
CG Animator: Yuichiro Yamashito
CG Artist: Matthew Maude
CG Artist: Sean Faden
CG Modeler: Greg Stuhl
Matte Painter: Tim Clark
EP: Michael Pardee
VFX Producer: Mark Allen Kurtz
VFX Assoc. Producer: Ryan Meredith
CG Producer: Jeff Werner

Editorial: Maury Loeb/PS 260
Editor: Maury Loeb
EP: Zarina Mak

Asylum
Asylum is a premier visual effects and design company, handling high-profile features, commercials, music videos, and emerging media content for web and mobile platforms. Asylum created the visual effects for such films as Master And Commander: The Far Side Of The World (Academy Award and BAFTA nominated), Moulin Rouge, Minority Report, Phantom Of The Opera, Pirates Of The Caribbean ll & lll, Mel Gibson's Apocalypto, Tony Scott's Déjà Vu, Man on Fire & Domino and Ridley Scott's Black Hawk Down. Asylum has done spot work for brands such as Nike, Sony Playstation, Coke, BMW, Gatorade and Visa. In addition, Asylum Design has created award winning title and graphic design work for such films as Tim Burton's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, X-Men I & II , The Island, Bad Boys II and XXX.

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