NIKE SHOXPLOITATION

I'll do my best here since I'm wasn't the creative lead - it's important to point out that Psyop is more like a design collective which means that any given project is usually the creative byproduct of two to maybe five people collectively directing different aspects of the same piece.

In the case of this project, one of the creatives at Nike came to Psyop and asked us to collaborate with them on a series of original stories that might directly or indirectly reference their a new line of urban footwear. Psyop then wrote a number of stories which were then developed and ultimately designed, directed, and executed in-house. It was pretty neat to see those first initial treatments since they were ultimately scaled back for practical reasons, mainly because we were producing a LOT of work under a pretty aggressive schedule, all 5 pieces were done in something like 6 weeks.

Todd Mueller and Kylie Matulick had decided on a very stark, graphic novel sort of look and they'd developed a really great graphic language for the world. And based on that language they'd also started singling out certain comic artists and graphic novelists whom they thought they'd like to work with, like Brian Wood of "Channel Zero" fame, and Bill Stankiewicz who's like this superstar illustrator.

Because of the sheer volume of work we were up against, we'd thought that we'd be doing a lot of 2d work for both the characters and backgrounds but in the end the 3d team sort of rose to the occasion and instead we wound up being able to handle a lot more than we'd been able to previously. I'd credit a lot of the efficiency and smoothness of the project to the fact that we had a really solid and experienced producer at the wheel (Boo Wong), who did an amazing job of keeping everything rolling at full speed.

We'd also built a number of efficiencies we'd in to our production methods - like almost every shot was rendered in to separate passes and assembled by Eben Mears in the flame under Todd and Kylie's supervision. The idea behind this was that everything would be rendered and composited only once under the director's supervision. Also the fact that we were using motion capture meant that most of what we were getting out of the mocap was generally approved in terms of it's staging, timing, and performance which basically eliminated the possibility of any endless animation fuckup/feedback loops happening.

We'd also gotten a lot better at handling motion capture and rigging characters - some of those improvements might not seem very noticable if you're just working on one character, but if you scale up the production tenfold those small improvements can translate in to really significant gains in terms of time savings. Those little things become the difference between going home on time or at 2am.

DON'T INHALE

This was a pretty neat project - it's not often that you're asked to make something ugly, frightening, or scary. This project was a pretty small team - mostly Eben Mears, Todd Mueller, and myself. We'd been asked to do a PSA about the effects of sniffing glue, which apparently seems to also wreck your brain.

There were these really great watercolors that this illustrator (Paul Dallas) had done, which were a really fantastic integration of type and illustration, and we started thinking about ways to bring it to life. Todd Mueller had done some projects a few years earlier when he was at SciFi Channel that had involved shooting practical liquids and using that as an element, and we'd thought that perhaps a similar approach using practical elements might work for us

I started out by tracing the head and type elements out in illustrator, and then sent the eps files to a sign company which laser cut the head in negative out of plexi. We then had that sandwiched against a sheet of flat plexi which gave us a clear plastic trough that we used for the practical shoot. When we were finally on set we had a pretty heavy duty setup where the practical rig was like 8 feet off the ground and underneath was a high speed camera shooting at 90-120 fps - and because of the high framerate our DP (Ben Dolphin) had rigged up a pretty heavy duty light rig which was just blasting the whole thing with tons of light. So we'd be going up and down this ladder and sort of pouring and squeezing bottles of inks and water in to the troughs we'd made, and dumping it all out in between takes which made for really physical and interactive experience compared to what we usually do.

After our shoot was over and we got the film back the real work could start - we made selections of certain takes and I started warping and matting out the footage and basically animated the spots in 2d. Then I gave those high-resolution plates (2k) to Eben for final compositing/edits in the flame.

This project was kind of a neat combination of a lot of the different ideas and techniques that we'd been developing but that might not necessarily have been seen together in the same project. Todd Mueller had decided to do a combination of 2D drawn style cel and fast moving graphic elements that functioned as a transition element that would transport you in and out of actual game play.

We had two characters from the game, Carmelo Anthony and Baron Davis playing a1 on 1 streetball game as we transitioned back and forth between the sketched out fiction we'd created and actual game footage. One of our guys here actually went and did a 3d track on the game footage and we'd transition out of that camera, in to our own camera, and back in to the 3d track of the next scene so quite a bit of work went in to coordinating all the editorial decisions along with all the usual animation direction that any spot like this would require.

I think almost everyone here has their own little pet projects that they work on in between commercials and after hours, but in terms of the company overall there's usually projects every so often that are self-funded and usually offer a little more creative lattitude than the commercial work. Psyop Anthem, the Personal Power Pathways, and the SemiPermanent pieces are good examples of that sort of independent noncommercial work.

Projects like these were actually one of the biggest reasons I'd wanted to work with these folks. When I first met Eben and Marco they were working at MTV and I was coming in during the day to work on Daria, but then at night Todd Mueller would be coming in and they'd be working on the "Company Flow" video which even now is pretty cool and has spawned a whole generation of imitators

5. Does Psyop use XSI exclusively? Which renderers do you prefer?

We mostly us XSI but we now have a smaller Maya team that was created really out of necessity - like we'd already hired every XSI person we could get our hands on and there were still fairly technically sophisticated projects coming that needed high-level people who could start without any rampup time. We've been getting better at moving data in between these different packages but I think it's pretty safe to say that we're predominantly XSI. Insofar as renderers go even the Maya people seem to use Mental Ray, which then means for the most part almost all of our rendering is through Mental Ray. There's been kind of an explosion of new third party renderers that've hit the market within the last year or so but I think it remains to be seen which ones get developed the most in terms of integration and their performance/quality metric.



6. Can you give us some insight on any of your up-coming projects?

Lots of commercials, lots of mocap, some of it is very realistic vfx work and some of it is very stylized non-photo realistic stuff too. Most of it will be seen within the next month or so.



7. How was Siggraph?

It seems like every year the floor show gets smaller and smaller but the quality of the work that we've been seeing in the electronic theater just gets better and better. Which suggests that there is a kind of narrowing of focus that's been going on but I think also that we're going to start seeing some interesting things happen in the way of realtime shading and high-level animation stuff, it still feels like there is still a lot of uncharted territory in that respect.



8. I've read that you train in Muaythai; a form of martial arts and kickboxing, often referred to as the "science of eight limbs". What form of Muaythai do you practice? How long have you been training?

I've been training only maybe 4 years or so, and only started competing this year so I'd consider myself quite a novice, if you could even call me that. There're Thai fighters who start training when they're seven and retire by the time they're in their twenties, with over a hundred fights under their belt. But the sport in the last few years has gained quite a bit in popularity in New York, probably because there're more events being held and I think that overall the level of competition has increased substantially. I'd credit my trainers who also organize a lot of these events to having contributed to the development of the sport in general here in New York (Kru Steve Milles and Kru Simon Burgess at 5 Points Fitness in New York). When Steve and Simon decided to start their own gym they were doing almost the same thing that all of the Psyop partners did when they quit their dayjobs and started building Psyop, it was something that seemed motivated by the same desire for independence and the same entreprenurial spirit which is something I highly respect.



9. What is Wai-Kuru? Is this at all related to Thai-Chi?

Wai Kru is the ritual/dance that the fighters perform before the fight where they pay their respects to their trainers and teachers, and sort of seal the four corners of the ring in preparation for the fight. It also serves to relax the fighters and stretch them out a bit.

Tai Chi is not from Thailand, it is from China and has nothing to do with Muay Thai. It is one of three or four Taoist martial arts, Hsing-I, BaGua Zhang, and Tai Chi being the 3 major "internal" styles of fighting. There is a fourth which is less known called Liu-He-Pa-Fa, or "6 Harmonies 8 Methods". I've been studying TaiChi and LiuhePafa with Master C.K. Chan for a number of years now, it's something I'd expect to continue at for probably the rest of my life.



10. What was the last great book you have read and what was the last great movie you have seen?

It's probably totally irrelevant but there was a really great slide presentation by a photographer named Hitoshi Toyoda last night which was a sort of visual diary of him returning to Japan to visit his sick mother and spending time at a Monastery and with these Japanese Amish folks. Very cinematic and poetic stuff, though it was neither a book nor a movie.