BP has some serious PR work to do after their series of blunders and gaffes.  So why not do what Domino's Pizza did and rebrand their image?

For this video, we had to make a cheesy TV news type animation showing the oil spill and BP's attempts at fixing it.  It's cheesy, real cheesy.

For Turtle Race: Episode 2 (featuring Brian Baumgartner of "The Office"), we actually originally did 2 sets of graphics, but an editing decision sadly cut one of them out.  The one that stayed though is probably the best part of the video though.  Its at the very end.  We had to make a commercial for a fake energy drink called Psycho Turtle that parodies the Old Spice commercials from a while back.  Not the super popular new ones with the "Hello ladies" suave handsome guy, but the ones from April 2010 with Terry Crews screaming at the camera.  If our parody commercial gives you a seizure... sorry about that.

Bros Icing Bros.  Some people know what I'm talking about, others need an explanation.  So, the quick gist of it is that its kind of a frat-boy like game that dudes who love to get wasted all the time do when they're sober... and want to get wasted... cause they're not wasted yet.  So basically, if one person randomly offers you a Smirnof Ice, you have to get on one knee and chug it.  You've been iced.  Now, if you happen to be carrying a Smirnof Ice yourself, you can counter the drink from the other guy and they then have to chug both.  Something like that.  I don't get it cause I'm not drunk or a frat-boy, but I'm sure its funny when it happens.  Anyways, I probably butchered the explanation, but I found a more in depth one for your reading pleasure.

Once you understand it, College Humor's video "Bros Icing Movies" will make more sense.  This wasn't a big job for us.  Just some background replacements, but the video is hilarious.  Silly Morgan Freeman.  He's so gullible.

"Canceled TV Show Love Song" is part of College Humor's "Summer of Music".  They are doing a bunch of original music videos over the summer which should be a lot of fun. 

So, before I go into what we did for the video, I'd just like to mention something that I didn't know until writing this post.  The word "canceled" falls into one of those weird American vs Canadian/British spellings of words.  You know, like "cheque" vs "check, "humour" vs "humor" and "theatre" vs "theater", etc.  Up here in Canuckland, we like to be generous with our L's.  We spell it "cancelled". And why not?  Who doesn't like a little extra L? 

So back to the video... We did 2 FX shots in it.  First, the reference to "Pushing Daisies" where the daisy in the guy's hand morphs from wilted to alive.  That was us.  Then, we did the shot right after where the guy with the daisy looks up in the sky and sees the Serenity (that's the ship from ill fated series "Firefly" - the best sci-fi show ever).  Both shots were composited in After Effects and the Serenity was modeled and animated in Maya.

Enjoy!

"Galactic Empire State of Mind" probably shouldn't warrant a blog post as we did very little in this one, but I thought the video turned out pretty good, and the costumes are great.  Based on "Empire State of Mind" by Jay-Z and Alicia Keys, this College Humor video was shot in front of a series of giant projectors that displayed the backgrounds.  While it seems that there are some graphics in the begining of the video, that wasn't us unfortunately.  What we created were the 5 seconds of backgrounds that featured (and I hope you know your Star Wars) Hoth (snow fields), Tatooine (desert) and Endor (jungle).  Awesome!  Hurray!

...ok ok, you got me.  The real reason I'm posting this is for the cheap grab at traffic that we can get with meta tags like "Star Wars" and "Jay-Z".  But still watch the video.  We really did do those backgrounds :)

Two weeks ago I was enjoying my wedding reception party when I got an email from our client Scott at Bright Red Pixels about the launch of a viral video we did for Lipton Brisk.  With all the commotion of having out of town guests to entertain, this one slipped by me somehow. 

So, I would like to present to you, "The Way of the Brisk" featuring MMA Champion Chuck Liddell.  The short was actually split up into 2 parts and both feature graphics work from Gloo.  In "The Way of the Brisk: The Untold Story", we did the destroyed green screen set, a shot of mini Chuck shooting out of a pipe over a waterfall, and a nice little toilet splash.

In "The Way of the Brisk: Chuck's Path", we worked on the exploding peach shot during Chuck's training routine.  It's a mix of particle FX and stock elements.  It was a really fun shot to work on too, and we're really proud of how it turned out.

The videos are featured on Lipton's site, Funny or Die, and Youtube.  Our friend Todd Strauss-Schulson directed the real Chuck Liddell portions.

Drink Brisk Baby!

Our good friend Carl Sondrol over at Sondrol Music was recently interviewed by Hollywood Chicago, and was nice enough to give a shout out to us.  In case you don't know who Carl is, he is the genius behind the sound and music in our Webby Award winning "Pixar Intro Parody" for Collegehumor.  In fact, Carl is the man behind a lot of the better Collegehumor sketches with great sound design.  He has been an amazing compliment to our work over the last year and we are thrilled whenever we hear that he will be doing the sound for one of our projects.  So please go read the article in support of the talented Carl Sondrol!

I'm not really sure what's up with College Humor lately.  They seem to be on a music video parody kick.  That's all fine I guess, but why this song? To torture us I guess.  ugh.  It definitely tops our Rude Boy Parody for obnoxiously burning itself into our brains.

Kidding aside, Replay ended up having some interesting and technically difficult shots to pull off.  While it was being filmed in the studio, there were some difficulties with the reflections coming off of his sunglasses.  To my horror, his sunglasses lens were taped up on set and needed to be remade in post.  After a dozen experiments to find an efficient solution to replacing the lens in every shot (there were 10 shots), we finally settled on completely replacing his entire sunglasses.  It was no small task.  We ended up planar tracking his face in shots where the actor's head didn't turn very much.  Shots that he did rotate his head too much, we had to track each lens separately, and had to track sections of it by hand. 

Building the iTunes album slider was a bit more fun.  We built it in after effects using expressions to drive the animation.  Yay!

The style of Replay Parody was fairly simple.  We did a mix of ipod commercial colored backgrounds with a hint of the really crappy "Official Video".  Hmm, I'm being quite negative today.  Sorry about that.  Tuesday blues? Anyway, Iyaz is super awesome.  He's my new favorite rapper-digitally-turned-signer and I hope he makes a million more totally not annoying songs like this one .  GOOOOOO IYAZ!!!!!!

Alright, I admit it... I had no idea who Rihanna was when we started working on this,  but trust me now when I say I won't be able to forget who she is.  She haunts my dreams now.  When I even think the word "rude" or "boy", this song plays over and over in my head for the next 45 minutes.  I... ahh... HELP ME!!!!

Rihanna aside, this video for College Humor wasn't all torture.  It had some fun moments.  Like the suggestive turtle head and bobbing fists, the stupid looking dancing dogs, and the eruption of pee.  I have to say, it does make time pass by a lot easier when you get to think up childish immature jokes for your job.  Anyways, the main point of the graphics in this one was to obviously put our new singer into an existing stylized music video, which I'm pretty confident that we were able to pull off in the end.  Oh, and just in case you were wondering about the style of some of our graphics, you can watch the real Rude Boy video here for some reasoning behind our insanity.

Enjoy!

Here's a quicky but goody for ya!  We did a couple simple quick graphics in a couple hours fo "Gritty Superhero Reboot".  Not really much to boast about graphics-wise on this one, but I personally think its hilarious... and cause I hate the Spiderman movies.  Enjoy!