London-based 3D animation and digital effects company Glassworks created a series of IDs in a campaign called “Fingers” for the BBC via agency Duckworth Finn Grubb Waters and director Alex Winter of The Brave Film Company. The IDs make use of live-action heads composited onto live-action hands to promote the BBC’s interactive content on all media, including the Internet and interactive television, under its new name, BBCi. The :20, :40 and :60 IDs are now airing on the BBC.
The 60-second ID begins with the image of a man and a woman sitting next to each other — the image is cropped to reveal only the couple’s heads and shoulders. As the camera pulls back, however, the couple is revealed to be a set of human hands with heads where the wrist would normally join. The bored-looking couple is sitting on a sofa on either side of a remote control. The woman’s finger hovers over the buttons of the TV remote control. The spot’s virtual camera goes on to show other hands in other environments, all looking bored and fed up. Some of the hand people are in an office, bouncing on their keyboards, while others are in a bar, leaning against their drinks. One of them kicks a peanut.
Click for Large Image
The music picks up as the hand woman presses a red button on the remote control — bright lights shine on the hand people and they look up in amazement at the new interactive world they have discovered. More hands join them — some on the sofa, others using a computer mouse to look at the Internet. A hand on the bar jumps up and down in celebration of a football goal being scored. The ID finishes with the image of another couple walking slowly together, joining hands as they turn to look at a giant screen that fills the background.
Glassworks carried out all of the special effects that made the spots possible, compositing the heads and hands together to create a convincing world for the hand people. The process began with tests using DV camcorders before the shoot took place. The shoot itself lasted a week and was followed by more testing to achieve the seamless integration demonstrated in the spot.
“After the weeklong shoot, the project spent two weeks in our inferno* suite,” said Glassworks inferno* artist Crawford Reilly. “The footage was shot without motion control because motion control would have restricted the director too much — we performed the camera moves within inferno* on all the shots. The shots with a lot of movement were the most difficult, but I think we managed to achieve very convincing results.”
