The project came to us as 22 shots each requiring Keying, Roto, Motion Tracking and Color Correction - and it all had to be done by the next day.  It's a good thing we're wizards at this type of stuff! You see, we got the job done by noon, had a big lunch, and then played air guitar for the rest of the day.  Yeah! We love our jobs. I'm sure you can tell that.

Here's something fun!  There were no tracking markers for any of this.  Fun, right!?  That meant we tracked most of it by hand and used little fragments of lint on his T-shirt as reference points.

If you haven't seen “Die Hardly Working” yet, you're missing out.  It is one of the biggest FX projects we've ever done for College Humor, and we're really proud of it.

The whole aim of this sketch was to feel like a live action Looney Tunes cartoon, with the action getting sillier and crazier as time goes on.  A lot of continuity was purposefully thrown out the door for the sake of fun.  So yeah, we know it doesn't always match.  Suck it up.

Originally, we were called on by College Humor to do the FX for just under 30 shots.  But the deeper we got  into it, Todd Strauss-Schulson (the director)  and I decided that we should just go all out on this one.  So those 30 FX shots turned into over 70.  Luckily for me, my wife was out of town for the month so I was able to work non-stop to be able to get it done on time.

For the FX people out there, objects like the knives, tooth, spaceship, missile and rocket launcher were modelled and animated in Maya, and then composited into the shots using After Effects.  The explosions were done entirely in After Effects using many layers of explosion/debris footage and hand made debris elements.  All the lens flares were created with the amazing After Effects plugin “Optical Flares” (which just happened to be released a week before we completed the FX).

If you're not familiar with "Hardly Working" on College Humor, I recommend you go check it out. It's a comedy series that depicts the everyday happenings at the College Humor office featuring  the actual CH staff.   Not to give them free advertising or anything, but I personally love it and they're a great bunch to work with.  I'd also like to give a shout out to a few people that joined the Gloo Team to help make this thing possible...

Anna Tonrungroj – Visual FX Assistant
Yuvraj Magar – Modeling
Chris Clogg – Photoshop Mattes

Finally, if you want to see a little bit more, we made "Making Die Hardly Working" just for you.  In it I talk with director Todd Strauss-Schulson about the craziness we went through to make this video possible.  Hope you enjoy it!

Since the launch of 'Die Hardly Working' our latest Visual FX extravaganza for collegehumor, the media world has been buzzing about Gloo Studios.  Online news agencies everywhere have been publishing about us, and now the Vancouver Sun has written a feature article about Gloo (including a snappy photograph of Jason, Mike and I).

Here's a list of some of the articles we've found so far.  We'll try to update this list as we find more articles - so please stay tuned!

As of March 12, 2010

Vancouver Sun
MSNBC
Yahoo! Finance
Benzinga
ABC
CBS

Gloo Studio's Mike Ritchie and Director Todd Strauss-Schulson discuss the process of making "Die Hardly Working".