Knucklehead’s Director duo The Dempseys create this film for Neulasta, which shows the benefits of receiving medication in a home environment instead of a hospital. As the main character goes to sit down in the hospital she is magically transported back to the comfort of her own living room. It was a pleasure to work with the Dempseys for the first time whilst acting as VFX Supervisor for the transitions in the 2 films. Featured here is one of those 2 films: ‘Rather Be Home’.
This transition was shot on a Panther motion control rig in 2 separate locations in Cape Town, South Africa. Each of the two scenes were deconstructed over a series of plates where all furniture, magazines, people etc were gradually removed until the rooms were completely empty. The main actor was shot along with the couch in the home environment but lit to appear like she is in the hospital. She was then rotoscoped into the scene and the plates combined as her lighting slowly changes to complete the transition from hospital to home. In supervising this shoot, it was key to get all measurements of camera height, track position & angle, room size, plus the positions of all furniture and people to enable us to rebuild the scene exactly after the rig had been moved to our second location. It was also important to carefully plan the order in which items were removed from the scene to enable unobscured plates of each object and person allowing freedom in the compositing stage to remove and insert items in any order throughout the transition. I was also able to turn around rough comps with a selection of plates whilst on set in order to give reassurance to the production crew and to assist with explaining the transition to the end client. The final comp was completed at Method Studios New York by John Yu.
I’ve posted here a heavily edited version of the actual film in order to focus on the effects shot. Unless you are shopping for both a VFX supervisor and cancer medication then you don’t need to sit through the other 90 seconds of legal disclaimer. In case you are shopping for Neulasta and not a Flame Artist, then be sure to read everything on this page instead.
Client: Neulasta Production Company: Knucklehead Directors: The Dempseys Producer: Bill James Post Production Company: Method VFX Supervisor: Leo Weston VFX: John Yu VFX Producer: Robert Holland
Gillette Venus beauty ambassador Emma Willis returns in the latest campaign spot from Grey, directed by Friend’s One In Three. The new spot contains five Emmas in various stages of readiness for a Christmas party. The five plates were shot using motion control and then rotoscoped together to create the final composite. A time-lapse outside scene moving from a crisp winter morning through to a cold snowy night was constructed in Flame and then camera tracked into the view through the windows. Other Flame work included adding in a frosted effect to the lower window panes in the bathroom and removing the reflection of the motion control rig and camera from the mirror in the bedroom.
Client: Gillette Venus Agency: Grey London Producer: Joseph Ogunmokun, Melissa Beeson Creative Director: Clemmie Telford Production Company: Friend Director: One In Three Producer: Guy Rolfe DoP: Oliver Cariou Post Production Company: Rushes VFX Supervisor: Leo Weston VFX: Leo Weston , Glenn Cone, Richard Russell VFX Producers: Rosanne Crisp & Sara Beckman Colourist: Marty McMullan
I provided on set VFX supervision and led a team of Flame & Nuke artists completing over 600 VFX shots for the TV series ‘The Royals’. Comprised of 500+ beauty and cleanup shots and around 100 other mixed VFX shots. The above example is a plate breakdown of one of 5 large crowd replication shots that we completed where 200 extras were replicated to around 10 thousand. That’s me in the foreground at the start of the breakdown. On this particular shot I also animated and comped in the Red Arrows along with coloured smoke particle trails.
Production Company: Privileged Productions, Lionsgate Director: Mark Schwahn Post Production Company: Rushes VFX Supervisor: Leo Weston VFX: Leo Weston , Sarah Breakwell, Noel Harmes, Bho Anthonysamy, Richard Russell VFX Producer: Ollie Whitworth
I provided on set VFX supervision and led a team of Flame, Nuke & Maya artists completing over 400 VFX shots for the film ‘Nocturnal Animals’. This included over 150 green screen comps for the car chase and art gallery scenes, 200+ mixed beauty and cleanup shots, sky & background replacements, CG composites, and one scene where we entirely removed and replaced an actor. It was an absolute pleasure to work alongside director Tom Ford and post supervisor Mark Harris for this project.
Production Company: Fade to Black Productions Distribution Company: Focus Features Director: Tom Ford Producer: Tom Ford, Robert Salerno DoP: Seamus McGarvey Editor: Joan Sobel Post Production Supervisor: Mark Harris Post Production Company: Rushes VFX Supervisor: Leo Weston VFX Artists: Leo Weston , Noel Harmes, Sarah Bakewell, Richard Russell, Craig Travis, Bharathi Anthonysamy, Emir Hashan, Lorenzo Newell, Ben Simmonds, Ivan Grozef, Humayun Mirza, Julia Caram, Klaudija Cermak, Sophie Hills, Adam Tennant, Jason Revillard, Arnaud Dumeyni Title Designer: Guy Hancock VFX Producer: Mireille Antoine, Caroline Laing Production Coordinator: Oliver Whitworth
Working closely with agency Designate and Dirty Films director Eli Sverdlov, the creative team at Rushes completed the new LV commercial “Make It Better”. Extensive VFX and CG elements were employed to realise the spot, which shows a family in their damaged car being carried by hot air balloons to an LV repair factory, whilst a team of fun quirky animated robots and machines quickly and efficiently mend the car and get it back on the road. I provided VFX supervision for this shoot in Valencia and Barcelona. The final VFX work was led by Jonny Hicks as I was off getting married.
Client: LV Agency: Designate Agency Producer: Emma Johnston Creative Director: Daniel Fagg Art Director: Faye Carré Production Company: Dirty Films Director: Eli Sverdlov Producer: Alex Bedford Post Production Company: Rushes VFX Supervisors: Leo Weston , Andy McNamara, Barry Corcoran CG Supervisor/Lead: Andy McNamara Design Lead: Barry Corcoran Concept Design: Jean-David Solon, Domhnall Malone Producer: Jules Pye Production Coordinator: Olli Whitworth Colourist: Denny Cooper CG: Craig Travis, Nimesh Patel, Adam Lindsey, Mark Woodcock, Robert Millin, Gerald Crome, Gary Cureton, Linda Johnson, Ryan Passmore, Zahra Al Naib VFX: Jonathan Hicks, Brian Carbin, Richard Russell, Lorenzo Newell, Noel Harmes, Sarah Breakwell, Sandra Roach
Between working on commercials, a few of the guys at Rushes & I had an idea to make a video of me ‘solving’ Rubik’s Cubes while juggling them. We’d seen a guy called Ravi Fernando on YouTube do this for real. It takes him about 6 minutes solving one at a time. We decided to do our own version but push it a bit further by doing it way quicker and in a more complicated juggling pattern. Seemed like a good bit of fun.
First, I purchased some really cheap knock offs from eBay. These ‘Rubix’ cubes (advertised as speed cubes) did not even turn without a lot of effort. I’m fairly sure I’m the only person to ever receive these cubes and not immediately send them back for a refund. Fortunately, we did not intend to turn these cubes at all, so they were entirely suitable for our purposes.
Somebody had told me once that it is possible to solve a Rubik’s cube from any position in 20 moves. As I was juggling 3, we decided that I needed to do at least 60 catches to make the video semi-plausible. We shot the video on the roof deck at Rushes and decided to frame in the Rushes logo in the background as a clue that all was not as it seemed. Although this clue was ignored by most of the people that eventually watched the video.
Our CG department were busy on actual jobs, so we built a CG model of a Rubik’s cube in Flame and scrambled it up one twist for every catch that I had made. The colours were then shuffled for each of the 3 cubes so that each one appeared different (although the solve algorithm remained the same on each one). From these models we then figured out what the faces would need to look like on each cube at the start of the video when I show the cubes to the camera to demonstrate that they are shuffled. We then scrambled up the real cubes to match the CG models and shot stills of these cubes in the same lighting conditions for each of the positions where my hands aren’t moving. These stills were then tracked on top of the shot plate of the unscrambled cubes and we faded between each still during the moments when the cubes were motion blurred.
We used a different technique for the part of the video where I start juggling and the cubes need to start solving. For this section we tracked in the CG models of the cubes and animated them to match the movement of the cubes we shot with. They were animated to gradually solve each time they were in my hands. Fortunately, due to the motion blur on the actual footage, you couldn’t see a lot of my fingers whilst my hands were in motion, so we didn’t have to do much work on the fingers themselves. Just a few frames here and there. Comments were even made between us at this stage like “This is so pointless” & “Nobody is going to watch this frame by frame”. We had no idea the level of scrutiny that the video would eventually have to endure from the “cubing community”.
The drawback of the motion blur in the shot footage on the other hand was that just placing new CG cubes in front of the shot ones was not enough to cover them entirely, so we had to paint out the original cubes frame by frame. (About 500 frames in all). This was by far the most time consuming task, and was taken on by Rich Russell, Lorenzo Newell & James Dooley. During this process, we were pleased with my decision to wear a plain black jumper that day, but less thrilled with the decision to film in front of a complicated background of overlapping railings and windows which was pretty much different on each frame. Rich said halfway through the painting process: “Next time we have the idea to do a thing like this, can we just not!”
Finishing touches included rotoscoping my fingers back in front of the composited cubes & adding believable shadows, reflections and lighting to the surfaces. I then recorded the sound from an actual Rubik’s Cube being solved and added this twisting noise to the video each time our CG model moved.
I had a Youtube channel already that I never used. We thought it best to not upload to a new channel. I changed my name from leowestonvfx to RuboCubo & had spent the few days before this deleting anything VFX related and liking and sharing videos of juggling and Rubik’s cube solves. I also for a laugh posted a comment on Ravi’s video saying “I think I can beat this”.
Then we posted the video.
Nothing happened obviously. I had no subscribers on my channel. I shared it to Facebook amongst my friends and got a couple of likes. Most of my friends knowing what I do for a living saw it for the sham that it was and weren’t afraid to say it in the comments.
The next day we posted it to Reddit. Harder than you think. You need a “Karma score” to post to the main videos page of Reddit which you earn over time by being an active & engaged user of the site. None of us filled this criteria. We then discovered that our head runner at Rushes was pretty active on Reddit so got him to post the video (3pm UK time – when America awakes – is apparently the best time to post). Then it started getting quite a few views and comments. Although nearing the end of the day I think we worked out we’d probably had about one view per hour of work invested in the video. Not such a good ratio. However one comment came from a journalist at Metro who had seen it on Reddit and asked if he could feature the video on their site. We obviously said yes. When I went to bed the video had about 500 views which I thought was pretty good going for the first 24 hours. I hoped that by the time I woke up we might have a thousand.
I woke up and checked the views on my phone in bed and it had 18,000 views! I thought this was pretty spectacular. Couldn’t wait to show the guys at work. By the time I got to work an hour later the views had doubled to 36,000. By 10am I had an email from a journalist at Buzzfeed asking for an interview about how I felt that the video was trending on Twitter in Japan. He included a link to the tweet. We clicked it and it linked to a gif that somebody had made of the video and tweeted. It had been liked and retweeted over 40,000 times and every time we refreshed the page it was gaining another thousand.
After that, it appeared on The Telegraph, then The Mirror, and The Sun. The messages on the Youtube channel were filling up with requests to post the video to various sites and feature on various TV stations. Fox News, ABC News, Fuji TV in Japan, Discovery Canada, The New York Post, Huffington, LadBible, Unilad etc. I obviously just said yes to everyone. I tried to answer all their questions while avoiding divulging whether or not the video was real or fake.
I think that we realised that we had actually “gone viral” when the video became the number 1 trending thing worldwide on Reddit (albeit a gif repost). So funny!
The point at which we shit our pants a bit was when Reuters got in touch wanting to push the video to every News network worldwide and directly asked: “Is the video ‘as shot’?”. We decided that we shouldn’t lie directly to Reuters, and avoiding the question was as good as a confession, so we ignored the email.
Over the following 48 hours across all the sites that we allowed to repost, the video got in excess of 20 million views.
It seems like lots of people believed the video was real (38% according to the Telegraph poll). But the best thing for us from a visual effects perspective was that even the ones who thought it was fake didn’t suspect CG. Theories ranged from reversed video, prearranged cubes, swapping in cubes near the end, self solving cubes etc. Probably Definitely the best endorsement of my compositing I have ever received!
Most of those who cried “fakery” took the video in the spirit in which it was intended – as a bit of fun. I suspect though, if you’re sat at home investing all of your time into trying to legitimately beat some kind of Rubik’s Cube solving record, and then some guy pops up on YouTube and undeservedly gets all the credit, then you could be forgiven for writing “Kill yerself” on the comments… possibly.
My favourite disgruntled comment was this one:
Happily though, since we revealed the illusion, I’ve received only positive feedback. Although one Japanese journalist did email me asking how I could have lied to him.
The thing that made me most happy is that Steve Mills himself – the inventor of ‘Mills Mess’ (The juggling pattern I’m doing in the video) got in touch to say how much he enjoyed the video!
We really enjoyed the 20 seconds of internet stardom we had, and are mainly happy that the hours we spent making the video weren’t a complete waste of time.
Once again, massive credit to Rich Russell, Lorenzo Newell & James Dooley for the time they spent with me making the video. And also to our PR guy Thom Trigger who had to deal with the shitstorm of press enquiries.
Below is a collection of some of the press the video got:
Then 50 Cent posted it…
On a random web show in the U.S.
Here’s a breakdown of how we made the video:
and here’s us picking up ‘Best Viral Video’ at The Lovie Awards…
Client: Rushes Post Production Company: Rushes Director: Leo Weston Camera: Glenn Cone VFX Supervisor: Leo Weston VFX: Leo Weston , Rich Russell, Lorenzo Newell, James Dooley
Friend Directors Tim & Joe lead us on a tongue in cheek tour through Bruno Banani’s Fragrance Lab where leggy ladies extract the essential oils and ingredients needed, and construct bottles for the Banani male perfume. VFX work included creating molten glass, heat haze & smoke effects for the bottle forging sequence, Compositing of the CG claw, CG augmentation of lab equipment, Compositing of liquids, plus beauty, pack work, rig removal, cleanup and title design and animation.
Client: Bruno Banani Agency: Grey London Producer: Jess Taylor Creative: Jamie Brunskill, Angela Harding Business Director: Nancy Suarez King Production Company: Friend Directors: Tim & Joe Producer: Luke Jacobs Post Production Company: Rushes VFX Producer: Jon Purton VFX Supervisor: Leo Weston VFX: Leo Weston Colourist: Simona Cristea Harrison CG: Craig Travis, Adam Lindsay MGFX: Guy Hancock
Rankin shoots a stunning new spot for Nike as they introduce the Mercurial Superfly CR7 ‘Savage Beauty’, inspired by Cristiano Ronaldo’s volcanic homeland of Madeira. The superfly spot was shot in Madrid in only a few hours with Cristiano Ronaldo. I provided on set supervision on this shoot and completed the VFX work at Rushes. Volcano stock footage was blended over silhouetted shots of Ronaldo. Other top layer smoke, lightning, hot ash and spark elements were also added to the composites. The end boot volcano comp is a combination of a CG smoke plume and shot smoke elements graded and composited together in Flame. The ad won an award for ‘Best VFX’ at Berlin Fashion Film Festival and also picked up the ‘Best Editing’ award for Rankin’s Gary Coogan.
Production Company/Agency: Rankin Film Director: Rankin Producer: Storr Redman Editor: Gary Coogan Post Production Company: Rushes Producer: Chris McKeeman VFX Supervisor: Leo Weston VFX: Leo Weston CG: Andy McNamara Motion Graphics: Barry Corcoran, Guy Hancock, Fraser Macedo Colourist: Simona Cristea Harrison
Saatchi & Saatchi Creative Team Matt Butterfield & Ben Mills bring us epic Pampers Wipes ad – ‘Pooface’. The first spot created for the Pampers ‘Don’t Fear The Mess!’ campaign. Shot by director Olly Blackburn out of Great Guns and posted at Rushes. Set to the classic score ‘Thus Spoke Zarathustra’ by Strauss, the film charts in high definition and in super slow motion, a big moment in ten young babies lives: doing a poo. As babies only seem to poo when you don’t want them to, this film benefitted from some subtle VFX help from me to warp and distort the babies faces that extra bit into contorted “poofaces”. The spot picked up three Cannes Lions awards (a bronze film Lion in the Toiletries, Cosmetics & Beauty category, a silver film craft Lion for casting and a bronze film craft Lion in editing).
Client: Pampers Agency: Saatchi & Saatchi Producer: Anne O’Neill Creatives: Matt Butterfield, Ben Mills Creative Director: Kate Stanners Production Company: Great Guns Director: Olly Blackburn Exec Producer: Sheridan Thomas, Laura Gregory Producer: Tim Francis DoP: Nanu Segal Editor: Andy Phillips, James Demetriou Producer: Rosanne Crisp Post Production Company: Rushes VFX: Leo Weston Colourist: Simone Grattarola
In a risqué spot for Ford, directed by B-Reel’s Tom Malmros, a tanned beach hunk sporting some snug-fitting swimwear helps demonstrate the benefits of keyless entry in the new Ford EcoSport. The car was shot as left hand drive and with the spare tyre on the back. We created multiple versions of this commercial for different territories (Left hand drive & Right hand drive), and for different models of the car (With and without rear mounted spare tyre). The most challenging shot was the final scene as the car drives past and away from the camera where we painted out the tyre and modelled, tracked and composited in a new back end to the vehicle as it moves through the dappled shade of the beachside location throwing up dust from the road. Other unnoticeable VFX in this spot included sky replacements, sign removal, photo effects, flipping car badges and enhancement of the wing mirror light effect as the car is unlocked.
Client: Ford Agency: Blue Hive / GTB Executive Creative Director: Karin Onsager-Birch Copywriter: John Kelley Art Director: Jesper Varlen Agency Producer: Mondi Howard Production Company: B-Reel Director: Tom Malmros Producer: Trine Pillay, Carrie Hart DoP: Johan Palm Editor: Spencer Ferszt Post Production Company: Rushes VFX Producer: Angela Lucantoni VFX: Leo Weston Colourist: Denny Cooper
