This week Psyop and KFC released I Love You Colonel Sanders! A Finger Licking’ Good Dating Simulator, developed at our Los Angeles studio and published to PC & Mac via the Steam store.
The announcement of the game “took the gaming community by storm,” as Paste Magazine put it, and we are pleased to see that the game’s release has been equally as successful.
Only a day after its release, the game had already
garnered a large and diverse fanbase across the web, with hundreds of
players recording their live performances of the game and some even dressing up as the Colonel himself.
The game has received 95% positive user reviews, with many calling it “the best game [they’ve] ever played,” as well as being highlighted by sevral online publications; Eater likened the graphics to “a highbrow shoji anime.”
Psyop is excited to welcome the incredbily talented director and visual artist, Shane Griffin, to our Psyop roster.
An Irish visual artist & director based in NYC, Shane pioneers a
conceptual & artistic approach to not only film, but sculpture,
animation, design, and large screen visuals.
Named an ADC Young Gun in 2012, and PRINT Magazines New Visual Artist in 2015, Shane’s style is constantly evolving and setting new trends. In 2018, Shane’s art film Chromatic was screened at the annual TED conference.
Psyop directors Marie + Marco take viewers on a visual teleport around the world and across cultures in the latest film for Corteva Agriscience.
Working with Corteva’s advertising partner Ogilvy & Mather, the film’s core story puts a magnifying glass on how farming, by nourishing our bodies, propels societal progress.
Created in exquisitely detailed CG, the film jumps through space and time with a fluid freedom that’s unique to animation. However, freedom never comes without costs, and with Corteva that meant intense, technical and creative problem solving at every stage as Psyop’s post artists found themselves in a race against time to launch the film at the NYSE when Corteva officially announced their IPO.
The scale of this project was really ambitious,” recalls lighting artists Thao Dan Nguyen Phan and Anne Yang, “We had so many assets to create in such a short amount of time and with shots going from wide to close up, we had to render all the textures in super high res with some shots having hundreds of items within them.”
Another creative challenge became clear during early animation was that the original static storyboards, didn’t come close to conveying the amount of actual shots needed to cover the sweeping camera moves that kept the film in perpetual transitioning movement – a visual conceit that conceptually pays off Corteva’s tagline “Keep Growing” and the core story of farming’s place the evolution of our world.
Like a live action director covers off wide, medium and close up shots, the Psyop post team, did the same – by creating for every creative eventuality. “Every single character you see in the film, you can zoom into and see them down to their eyelashes, or their arm hairs just to make sure we’re covered for whatever camera move is needed,” explains Briana Franceschini, Technical Director.
Before production, the post artists were also given a detailed inspiration deck that helped guide them throughout the process with a bit of ingenuity and rapid prototyping thrown in along the way. “We had a nice specific selection of reference photos we could use for comp to get the light and colors in the direction of choice,” recalls Matthias Bauerle, Lead Compositor, “Marco also liked the unique look of anamorphic lenses. So we tried to mimic that on top of the CG renders. We watched a lot of test footage on how the real lenses react visually and then I rebuilt it as a little tool for all the compositors to use.”
The team also came up with other unique solves to the production including bringing in matte painters at the onset and also deliberately blurring the lines between post artist roles. “Lighters, for example, were given entire scenes to create – where traditionally they’d be paired up with layout artists. I don’t know how we would have gotten it all done if we hadn’t all stretched outside our boundaries a bit,” recalls Franceschini.
Director: Marie Hyon, Marco Spier Executive Producer: Eve Strickman Senior Producer: Suzie Cimato Associate Producer: Jodi Kraushar Designer: Alex Dietrich, Kim Dulaney, Joshua Harvey, Dor Shamir, Pedro Lavin, Andrew Park, Guzz Soares Storyboard Artist: Ben Chan Lead Technical Director: Briana Franceschini Previz Artist: Pat Porter, Michael Sime, William Burg, Ryan Moran Lead 3D Animator: Pat Porter 3D Animator: William Burg, Ryan Moran, Michael Sime, Jessie Wang Modeler: Ieva Callender, Justin Diamond, Casey Reuter, David Soto, Alan Yang, Briana Franceschini, Nitesh Nagda, Eric Cunha Lead Rigger: Zed Bennett Rigger: Aton Lerin, Matt Kushner LookDev/Lighter: Ieva Callender, Eric Cunha, Briana Franceschini, Nitesh Nagda, Todd Peleg, Thao Dan Nguyen Phan, Anne Yang, Matthias Bauerle VFX: James Atkinson, Eban Byrne, Cristina Camacho, Kevin Gillen, Michael Huang, Nico Sugleris Matte Painter: Susie Jang, Henrik Sang Junior Matte Painter: Zi Xu 2D/Comp Lead: Matthias Bauerle Compositor: Aaron Baker, Herculano Fernandes, Carl Mok Editor: Loren Christiansen Flame Assist: Andrew Malvasio
As part of their ongoing partnership with Parley for the Oceans, adidas unveiled a new UltraBOOST Parley running shoe, created from upcycled plastic waste, and has kicked off a multiplatform global marketing campaign to promote it. Together, creative studios Psyop and Golden Wolf were honored to create the centerpiece of the campaign: a new film demonstrating the positive, transformative nature of reused ocean plastic.
Working alongside adidas’ creative agency TBWANeboko,
Psyop and Golden Wolf used a combination of live action and
animation to show the way in which plastic waste threatens our
oceans, but can be reclaimed and transformed for good. To
approach such a complex idea, Psyop and Golden Wolf
embraced a mixed media approach that reflected the spirit of
community coupled with innovative technology that goes into a
conservation effort like this. Each pair of UltraBOOST Parley
shoes prevents approximately 11 plastic bottles from entering
our oceans, as the bottles are intercepted from beaches and
then transformed into a new material that makes up these unique
sneakers.
Psyop director Marco Spier explained why he was so excited to create this film for adidas x Parley, saying, “This project is very close to my heart. I got involved with Parley for the Oceans from the beginning and having the opportunity to help spread the message together with adidas and TBWANeboko has been a great honor. Psyop is a collaboration partner of Parley, and it was great to see Psyop and Parley joining forces to create this and I can’t wait for the next opportunity. As Paul Watson the Sea Shepherd pointed out, the ocean will be dead by 2048. ‘If the ocean dies, we die.’ This is bigger than us. This is about survival. Ocean plastic is not just just the fiber used in the actual production process, from collected bottle to shoe, but is also very metaphorical. It’s the fiber, the thread that connects everything, always present. It shows how every action has a consequence. How the universe is connected and we can’t isolate one thing from another.”
“With everything going on in the world today it was a breath of
fresh air to get to work on a campaign for a cause as good as
Parley’s,” explains Golden Wolf director Ingi Erlingsson. “What
really drew us to this project was that the challenge was both
creative and technical, so it felt like a really perfect chance for us
to collaborate with the team at Psyop, combining our trademark
2d style with their incredible 3d pipeline.”
In creating the spot, Psyop utilized a unique CG fiber and thread
system to mimic the way in which the UltraBOOST Parley shoes
themselves are crafted from ocean plastic fibers. “I loved the
idea that the animation is made out of ocean plastic, but at the
same time, we felt like not wasting actual ocean plastic to make
advertising,” said Spier. “So we were excited to create our
virtual yarn, still keeping the tactile quality of the material, but
without creating any waste. All we have to do is to hit the delete
button.”
“Working alongside Marco on this project was a really great
learning experience for me personally. I really enjoyed the
pitching process and the challenges that the shoot threw at us, it
felt really collaborative and we were able to push the creative
even further on the day,” added Erlingsson.
R&D LEAD, Jonah Friedman:
There are reasonable and unreasonable ways to do things. In
the past when asked to make a Christmas sweater, we opted to
create a system called the “Entwiner”, which makes woolen knits
out of millions of CG fibers rather than a simple texture. Is that
reasonable? Probably not, but it looks a lot better.
So when we were tasked to create patches, which would be
made out of merely hundreds of thousands of fibers, what were
we going to do? Is it even a question? Fibers!
There were challenges. First, our particular style of patches use
sewing direction and stitching for effect – these are artistically
created pieces and cannot just be translated from 2D animation
by a CG sewing machine. Second, we needed to make
hundreds of these, to animate stop motion, so we also had to be
very efficient.
Our solution was a new system, called the “Patchtwiner”. The
Patchtwiner was a system and toolbox for artists to turn 2D
animation into properly “Entwined” patches.
Every frame of our animation looks as though an artist stitched a
bespoke patch, creating contours and laying down stitches to
represent the image in the best way possible.
Stop motion is difficult, and results in imperfections, and we
recreated those for ourselves. The patches are differently
deformed on every frame, as if they were sewn to a piece of
fabric that wouldn’t sit still. The light jitters on every frame, and
the effect is complete: artist created stop-motion patch
animation.
LIGHTER, Thao Dan Nguyen Pan:
adidas UltraBOOST X Parley was a challenging project where
every part of the process was an exploration. Jumping around
as different roles, doing R&D, lighting & rendering to comping, I
got to have the freedom to test different ideas.The goal was to
find the right amount of imperfection… distortion that makes it
realistically hand-crafted. It was a frame by frame process: from
stitching the threads to moving the fabric, changing the
indentations and shifting the lights. We literally did stop motion
in 3D.
