We recreated the video game shots for this video.  And it was a first for all of us here at Gloo to shoot a deer.  The toughest part was capturing it first so we could attach the Motion Capture trackers.  After that we just set if free and then shot it.  This method provided the best simulation of a deer collapsing after being shot.

Just kidding! We created all of the deer in 3D using Maya, animated them and then composited them into the video game using After Effects. Sounds a lot easier right?

Our responsibilities didn't go much further than some titles and a few Rotten Tomatoes pages. So we won't stand here and gloat or anything... ahem.

Have you ever had a hard drive fail? Not that big of a deal really, as long as you keep proper back ups and all that stuff that's recommended and SO easy to do.  Well, we goofed.  Our back ups were not up to date, a hard drive was inadvertently formatted, and poof - there went like 2 months of work.  Yeah, that sucked and caused A LOT of stress, mostly for Gloo's Director of VFX, Mike Ritchie (right Mike?)

OK, long story short, we found out about a company in Vancouver called Aceon Data Recovery.  They took our computer for a few days and actually retrieved every single file that was deleted. Cool, right? And it's not like the files were all jumbled together with no rhyme or reason. They were all in the folders that they should have been and named properly - and upon rebooting the OS, it was a simple drag and drop procedure to get everything running perfectly once again.

So, my rave review goes out to Aceon Date Recovery because they saved our lives this week.  I highly recommend that you all go out now and delete your harddrives so that you can see for yourself just how amazing Data Recovery can be.  Seriously!

It's our latest collaboration with CollegeHumor.com and it features lightning, rats, ghost snakes and scariest of them all - frame rate discrepancies!  Oooooooh.  Ok, so you'll never notice the frame rate issues now, but at the time of production it was pretty scary!

There's a whole mix of Visual FX in this music video parody, so keeep your eyes peeled for our handy work.  We also Color Corrected the video to match Eminem's 'I'm Not Afriad' MV.  So check under your bed, lock the cellar door and click the play button below.  Enjoy!

This video was released quite a few weeks ago, so I'm a little late posting it here.  It's not that I don't like this video.  I do.  I think it's funny and I love the production design.  But we've had so many releases lately that I end up tossing this one to the backburner in order to feature something more recent.  So, enough of this senseless procrastination.  To take you into this beautiful weekend, please sit back and enjoy 'Peter Pan's Ladies' on GlooStudios.com!

We did the wire removal for when Peter comes flying in through the window, and then pulled off some fancy FX work to make Peter and the girls appear to fly back out the window.  College Humor used a simple flashlight cast upon the wall to create the placement of Tinkerbell, so we just tracked that point and added in some particles to act as Tinkerbell.  And in a couple of shots we recreated Peter's shadow on the wall.  All of this was done with After Effetcs... no pixie dust required.  That guy down the alley charges FAR too much for it!

College Humor asked us to put together a representation of what Wii Fit would be like on super easy mode and the result is within the video below.  We recreated the menu based on photos snapped of the TV screen while Mike got in his regular 3 minutes of cardio per day. The Mii character and a replica Hulu Hoop location were both created using Maya, and to give it the perfect Nintendo look we rendered it out with low-antialiasing. This produced a pixilated hardware rendered effect. Voila!

Though we didn't create any of the other super easy modes in this video, my personal favorite is actually Punch Out!  Take that King Hippo!

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.

Another great music video parody by College Humor and we were brought in to pull off the very last shot of this WoW (World of Warcraft) dance party.  In most cases, casting a Rank 3 Holy Light is pretty straight forward, however we were low on mana and had to use After Effects instead.  Same result really.

Sobe (you know, the fruit beverage we all love) has recently gone into producing short videos online under the name Sobe Studios.  And you probably already know that because we showcased the Animated Logo and branding we did for Sobe Studios a month or so back.  Well, now there's even more to show off today!

Mr. Vicarious: Street Pranks.  This new vid featuring Nick Kroll and Paul Scheer from, "The League" opens with the logo you've all seen (and hopefully loved), and closes with a brand new rebranding animation we made for the launch of Sobe's new bottle design.

The bottle was completely recreated in Maya by Gloo's Paul Desilva (who made it look like a breeze, mind you).  Don't get me wrong though! A LOT of work went into making this look ABSOLUTELY perfect.  I mean, you think it's easy to make glass 'drop down' like a common pair of pants.  When I asked Desilva how he got it to look just right he said, "I spent tons of time standing in front of the mirror with my pants around my ankles. Finally someone came and pulled them up for me so I could finally leave the bathroom and get to work."

The VFX here were pretty straight forward.  I'd like to say that we played a lot of Sims in order to prepare for this one, but really we didn't get too far past designing and furnishing a house (I mean, that IS the funnest part of the game, right?)

Besides creating the little thought icons that pop up, the video mostly required Motion Tracking. You see that little green diamond above the doctor's head.  Well, we added that in. Oh, and the shot of the heartbeat monitor - that was yanked from a previous project for CollegeHumor, Gritty Superhero Reboot.