BLACKBERRY SPEC SPOT TAKES SHOT AT APPLE
February 25, 2009

BLACKBERRY SPEC SPOT TAKES SHOT AT APPLE

WATCH THE SPOT

In the spot, fruit is used to represent both parties. An off-screen gunshot blows through the core of an apple, with slow motion imagery detailing the entry and exit points. When the projectile emerges, the viewer sees that it is actually a small blackberry that caused all the damage.

The concept was presented to head of Guava's CG department Adrian Graham, VFX supervisor Jep Hill, and design director Jay Sienkwicz, with the brief to shoot a blackberry through an apple.

"Each of us has our own area of expertise," notes Graham.  "Jep has an in-depth knowledge of photoreal CG, Jay has a great design sense and a talent for timing and pacing, and I have experience in physics-based animation and pipeline development. We each brought to the table different skill-sets that together made the spot shine."

Harold Edgerton's 1964 high-speed photograph of a bullet piercing an apple provided a reference point, but the team still had to figure out how things would look before and after.

"We wanted to convey the sense of traveling a long distance in a spatial environment without blurring things so they're unrecognizable," Sienkwicz explains. "We had to fly the blackberry in the frame, explode it through the apple and keep everything in focus with depth of field and clarity."

Graham and Sienkwicz took reference photography of an apple, which Sienkwicz massaged in Adobe Photoshop and texture mapped onto the CG apple. Graham used Autodesk Maya for animation and modeling, with the explosion driven by Maya fluid simulations.

Hill composited elements using The Foundry's Nuke and did distributed rendering with Mental Ray running on a team of dual quad-core Macs.