BlackBerry's comeback spot for Super Bowl XLVII
"One VFX highlight of this spot involved transforming a jack-knifing truck rushing toward stranded pedestrians into thousands of rubber duckies. Mill 3D Lead Artist, Ajit Menon said, "The challenge was not just to envision what these ducks would look like, but also to imagine what would happen if the inertia and the protective shell of the truck suddenly disappeared to send the ducks hurtling toward the pedestrians."
Head of 2D, Gavin Wellsman, added, "The most challenging part of the job in preparation for the shoot was the fire sequence - the way in which we filmed the elements was technically perfect." He explained, "The special effects crew built a gas controlled mannequin in black that we matched with the angles for our head and chest flames for our medium shot. For our wide shot, our stunt team gave us great flame elements of separate human arms and legs on fire walking for us to wrap around our Hero character. It is this interaction of flames around these boday parts that really helped us to make the sequence interesting. We kept the flames over cranked at 48fps to give the look of the fire a slightly more hyper-real and graceful characteristic."
"Another scenario involved the main character suddenly acquiring elephant limbs which with to stomp around the scene, creating a moment of chaos," said Menon. "The realism of this visualization was increased by giving the elephant a skin dynamic sliding to "roll" over the bones. Adding dust, debris and cracking pavement further reflected the mayhem around."