LG joy to life

The Skinny

Joy. Now in a Smartphone. The tagline of BBH China’s latest spot for the LG GM730 Smartphone neatly sums up the product’s unique range of easy to use, life-enabling features designed to bring joy to your life.

Personifying the fun applications as cute, quirky hand puppets, BBH China’s creative team of Yinbo Ma and Carol Ong explain how they brought the global campaign to life: “The task was to demonstrate key phone features, but we wanted to show them in a very human way. Hand puppets are perfect. They immediately make you feel happy. You want to keep playing with them. That’s what LG GM730 Smartphone is all about, it’s joy in your hands.”

The Production

BBH China, Gravity Films Shanghai and Blackmagic Design jet off to a Paramount Studios’ backlot in Los Angeles where a 1970’s Brooklyn set provided the perfect backdrop for the Sesame Street inspired spot. “Our original idea was to use the real Sesame Street sound stage and backlot but unfortunately various copyright and cost issues made this impractical. We then had a breakthrough in the form of founder and chief puppeteer BJ and his company who did a great job designing the LG Appets and choreographing a small army of puppeteers. The shoot was absolutely hilarious and everyone had a lot of fun on set.” Explains Gravity’s executive producer, Merrillyn Lim.

BMD VFX director Damien Yang was on set throughout the three-day shoot to ensure that all necessary background plates and elements were captured for compositing and to assist in simplifying the VFX production requirements. Yang commented: “Rather than shoot lots of green screen for the LG Appets, we instead shot them in situ interacting with the human

talent against the actual sets. As the camera was locked off for most scenes, this meant that we could shoot clean background plates and paint out the puppeteers. Taking this approach saved a lot of time in production and ensured that all the elements married seamlessly together.’

The Post

With the offline completed in LA, the VFX, grade and finishing came back to Blackmagic Design in Singapore. All 35mm rushes were scanned at 2K on BMD’s high speed, high quality film scanners and scenes were divided up between BMD’s team of VFX Artists. Due to the extensive rotoscoping required to remove the puppeteers from behind the ‘furry’ puppets, the high resolution, highly detailed 2K scans proved indispensible. This was particularly the case for the scene where six LG Appets appear from behind a lamp post.

BMD senior VFX artist Leong Beng Wee explains: “The lamp post scene was shot in three plates, one for the LG Appets appearing on the left of the lamp post, one for those appearing on the right and one clean main background plate. We split the first two plates vertically down the center of the lamp post and joined them together but there was still some puppeteers’ arms that could be seen behind the puppets. Effectively rotoscoping around the furry edges of the puppets to paint out the puppeteers’ arms was only possible due to the resolution of the 2K files.”

The SMS Appet scene required 3D object tracking and the creation of CG soup. Set in a hair salon an LG Appet flies in with a bowl of alphabet spaghetti soup spelling out a text message. BMD’s senior CGI artist Ganesh Ghale explains: “First we tracked the live bowl and then modeled an identical CGI bowl in order to have an accurately contoured receptacle for the CG soup to sit in. We used Maya nCloth to create the organic liquid form of the CG soup’s surface and rendered multiple passes for colour, highlights and reflections to give our compositors maximum control over the final look of the soup. For the text message itself we experimented with a couple of different approaches and found that a texture map gave us the best result.”

Aside from rotoscoping furry Appets and cooking up CG soup, the scene that proved possibly the most challenging for post was the final one where a float featuring no less than 16 LG Appets is seen parading down the street. Configured in four rows of four the LG Appets seamlessly transition from their windows in the festive float through to matching positions on the final LG GM730 Smartphone pack shot. To achieve the seamless transition the live shot float had to be disassembled in post and rebuilt with each window repositioned to correspond exactly with the screen layout of the LG GM730. Once the live float had been rebuilt, each of the 16 LG Appets was then tracked and composited into its respective window and layers of live crowd elements were composited into the foreground along with live confetti elements to achieve the final festive scene.