Great Guns and JWT London for Levoreact

JWT London and global production house Great Guns collaborate with renowned animation and motion capture company House of Moves to create a fully CG world in an epic video game-inspired television commercial for the anti-histamine nasal spray Levoreact.

 

Great Guns director Jim Sonzero, whose work includes spots for Levi’s, Mercedes-Benz, Jaguar, Dr. Pepper and Coca Cola, as well as the movie ‘Pulse’, helmed the spot. Sonzero’s extensive experience in the world of videogames, directing the jaw-dropping cinematics for the blockbuster games ‘Killzone 3’, and ‘Resident Evil 5’, made him an obvious choice for the project. A choice well made, as far as JWT’s Creative Director Dominic Lynch Robinson was concerned. “Jim and Great Guns? Simple. We’d have been sunk without them. Client was scared (rightly so) and agency had a vision but no idea how to realise it. Jim shaped and moulded the idea with us, challenging, inspiring and supporting us every step of the way. Great Guns and Sheridan (Great Guns’ Head of Production – an ex-videogame producer himself) made the money work, shared the creative ideal and kept the faith throughout. Can’t ask for more than that.”

 

The spot, which mimics the look and feel of a first-person shooter (FPS) videogame, places the viewer into what seems like a beautiful, serene landscape full of colourful flowers. It soon becomes apparent, however, that the hero is in the midst of a highly threatening pollen-filled warzone and he must fight his way to salvation in the form of a medkit containing a bottle of Levoreact.

 

When choosing a mocap and animation house to work with on the project, the Great Guns team settled on the California-based House of Moves.

 

“When JWT and Sheridan approached me about the project I couldn’t believe my luck as it presented me with the unique challenge of making a spot as visceral and as exciting as a first person shooter game within the constraints of a 30 second marketing campaign,” enthuses Sonzero. “This was a very bold campaign for a client to move forward with, and whilst working within the regulations of that particular brand category forced us all to make some minor compromises, both the client and agency were fantastically collaborative and supportive of me pushing the envelope as far as I could.”

 

“The trick was finding that balanced execution that would cover all brand requirements whilst remaining respectful to that game genre. Working with House of Moves to build the world in the Unreal engine allowed us to maintain the highest level of authenticity possible in this respect. Hopefully we’ve remained faithful to the hardcore gamer’s experience and they’ll really get a kick out of the spot.”

 

Guided by Sonzero, the artists at House of Moves were able to efficiently conduct extensive previsualisation for the spot, constructing the spot’s environments and other features including flower animation, lighting and particle effects, and CG character animation based on performance data from a preliminary mocap shoot. Using the game engine, the team worked side by side with Jim to manipulate a virtual camera in the previz environment in real time, which allowed him to examine various camera angles and effects to quickly tweak and revise the spot as needed.

 

“The really cool thing about our pipeline is that we were able to work in a fully textured environment from the beginning, with dynamic sunlight and swaying trees and everything,” explained Peter Krygowski, producer/editor, HOM. “Having so much of the spot fleshed out so early was pretty mind-blowing for the client, and it was great for us because when we transitioned into the production phase it was just a matter of upgrading and finessing those environments to make them high quality, hi-res renders. We were way ahead of the curve.”

 

After previz was completed, the team conducted a full motion capture shoot, modeling elements in ZBrush and working in Autodesk MotionBuilder to animate the final CG character. Sonzero and HOM artists spent over two months creating the final CG environments – designing and animating the flowers to “fire” like guns, determining final object placement within the environment, experimenting with depth, and more. Since Unreal leverages GPU power, frames could be rendered on only six workstations with an average render time of 3-4 minutes, which proved invaluable during production as changes could be made and re-rendered in hi-res within the same day.

 

“The power and speed of working this way gives us unparalleled flexibility on any type of project and allow us to deliver things that others cannot,” said Krygowski. “Leveraging game engine technology in our pipeline allows us to work with a relatively small team and without a render farm or any expensive hardware, which helps us stay under budget and avoid an infrastructure overhaul. And its reliable speed allows our team to focus on creative output instead of wasting time on endless renders. For instance, in the Levoreact spot, just the last shot of the character walking away had a 12-billion polygon count alone. Normally we would have needed a matte painter to help with the background and it would have taken days to render, but with this pipeline we could handle it ourselves – and in just 18 minutes per frame of render time – which saved us both money and time. Unreal was

 

Credits:

Client: McNeill Healthcare

Product: Levoreact

Agency: JWT, London

Creative Director: Dominick Lynch-

Robinson

Account Director: Sarah Kay

TV Producer: Panos Louca

Creative Team: Naz Nazli & Rob Welch

Production Company: Great Guns

Director: Jim Sonzero

Producer: Sheridan Thomas