Unit Image - An Award winning Creative studio based in Paris which has done many Top-class 3d animation & visual FX for commercial, music video, and films. They have just completed the amazing spot for CANAL: CANAL Kitchen. This spot was nominated for Outstanding Compositing in a Photoreal Commercial of VES awards 2017. We're lucky enough to have the exclusive interview with them to see the secret behind the screen. Check it out!
Could you please introduce us to the Canal Kitchen Project, and tell us how many artists worked on this, and how long it took for it to be completed?
The concept of Canal Kitchen is based on a very gastronomically-French analogy; just as great cooking requires great recipes, great TV requires the best ingredients, and thus the best channels. The TVC takes place in the bustling kitchens of a big restaurant and at the peak of rush hour. The chefs are busy slicing cartoons instead of onions, peeling police cars mid-chase, and seasoning with explosions instead of spices. We at UNIT IMAGE were responsible for the VFX part of the TVC. The timeline for the project was quite challenging since – in addition to the time we had for asset creation – we had 5 weeks to integrate all the effects in the project. This determined the size of our team, as we needed more hands on deck in order to create the best shots within the stipulated timeframe. Our team grew to almost 30 staff with a mixture of both genders.
My most favorite is probably the Car chase. We had worked on similar car-driven projects before it, and one of such was with the Peugeot Crew. We gathered a lot of experience from these projects and that expertise was one of the things that BETC and the director – Antoine Bardou-Jacquet – looked out for when they selected their VFX partners. They put all their trust in us for this very technical and complex aspect, and we thank them for that.
Canal, BETC, Partizan and Antoine all have extremely high qualitative and artistic standards for all their ads. This meant that each effect – as different as they were from one another – was expected to be at par with the best blockbuster movie VFX out there today.
Actually, the biggest secret for us starts just before the pipeline. It’s all about the people −and recruiting the right talents for the team. If you want to create an amazing movie, nothing is more important than getting the most talented, motivated, and team-oriented kind of people on board. We were all highly motivated for this particular project day-in and day-out, and the entire team was convinced that this TVC would be a big hit.
What were the softwares and plugins used by your team? Was there any special tool in particular?
We used 3DS max, V-Ray, Nuke… and a couple of other secret ingredients ;)
Happily (and it happens very often in our industry) our main challenge happened to be the most enjoyable part: Each effect being completely different from the other. From a technical standpoint, this pushed us to develop new tools for look dev, plugs, as well as scripts for each effect. From a team perspective, each asset required entirely different talents and techniques. For example, animating a realistic-looking 3D velociraptor is 1000 light-years away from animating a 2D cartoon character.
Of course, motivation is key in your team. But at UNIT IMAGE, we love working with people who are flexible and adaptable to different kinds of tasks and techniques, those that are pro-active and also enjoy taking charge of full shots!
Agence : BETC
Production : Partizan
Director : Antoine Bardou Jacquet
Post Production : Unit Image
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