Chris Smallfield

ShowReel  Shot Breakdown (PDF)

Sears “Arboretum”
Dir. Rupert Sanders
Agency: Young & Rubicam

When I saw the concept art and storyboards for this spot I thought, “This is going to be the most amazing and beautiful spot for tools, ever!” I think I was right. It turned out wonderful and after all these years remains in my top 3 favorite projects. Working with Laurent “Biddy” LeDru (now a director for Psyop), we created the Lawnmower Water Lillies. I did the modeling and animation and Laurent did the rendering and lighting. the whole spot was created at Method studios with 5-6 CG artists and 3-4 Compositors.

bbb

Nickelodeon “Spongebob Iconic”
Dir. Dyrdee Media
Agency: Nickelodeon Deutschland

Several countries created “Iconic” Spongebob Squarepants short film and this is the one from Germany. Directed by the massively talented boys at Dyrdee Media. The FX were done by myself (CG Burger, Butterfly and the epic 3d matte painting end shot) Ian Hutchinson (animation,compositing and on set VFX sup) and Jochen Weidner (animation, compositing). Created at Dyrdee Media.

check out the making of below…

Toyota “Aging”
Dir.
Agency:

This commercial was shot in stark and empty locations, then aging and corroding effects were were created by 4-6 CG artists and 2-3 Compositors. I worked on the tunnel with James LeBloch, created the 3d Matte Painting for the bridge shots, and did the close up cracked street. I even did the final compositing for the bridge shots. Created at Method Studios.

Terminix – “End of the World”
Dir. Francois Girard
Agency: Publicis Dallas

Role: 3D VFX Lead, Matte Painting, Texturing

I was pretty impressed with the boldness of this spot. We were told to make an utterly devastated city, the humans are dead and gone, only roaches have survived! It was a lot of fun to do such a dramatic commerical. I was the Lead 3D Artist and Matte Painter, and with the assistance of the talented Matt Longwell and Seb Caudron, the three of us were able to finish it with only minor revisions ever asked for. They were very happy with the job. Created at Method Studios.

Zune – “The Academy of Dreams”
Dir. Patrick Daughters
Agency: T.A.G./ McCann Worldgroup

Role: 3D VFX Artist, modeler, textures, rendering and lighting

Another beautiful spot in this Zune campaign, I had a smaller role in this one. I made a CG clay head of the main actor, lit and rendered it. My role was 3d Generalist. 5-6 Cg Artists and 6-7 Compositors created this spot, at Method Studios.

Zune – “The Ballad of Tina Pink”
Dir. Patrick Daughters
Agency: T.A.G./ McCann Worldgroup

Role: 3D VFX Artist, set extension, matte painting, tracking

Details:
This beautiful campaign had a lot of challenges, but turned out great. I was responsiblae for matte paintings and set extensions, in the forced perspective room. Man, traking a forced perspective is incredibly difficult, but he results is good and I’m proud of all the work people did on this spot. 4-6 CG Artists, 5-7 Compositors. Created at Method Studios.

Bridgestone Tires “Scream”
Dir. Kinka Usher
Agency: The Richards Group

Role: 3D VFX Artist, modeler, textures, animation

Details:
I replaced a turtle’s head, replaced his jaw with a CG one, made him scream. A small bit of a great commercial, but people on youtube seemed to especially love the turtle

In the office

In the hallway

What a mess

Role: 3D VFX Artist, R and D, Lighting and Rendering, Particle SImulations, Modeling, Managing assets, tracking.

Details:
This job was insane. Probably the most amount of hours on a project I’ve ever worked. I was responsible for nearly all of the lighting and rendering,  did many of the initial nParticle simulations, created and managed the clip art assets,  helped with R and D and did a little tracking.  The challenge with this spot, other than the short timeframe, was managing 50,000 to 100,000 animated instances, assigned to dynamic particle simulations, sometimes rendering as much as 400 million polygons in a single frame, 10 pass exr images, HD 1080 resolution, Final Gather, Ambient Occlusion, Raytracing, and keeping the render time below 20-40 minutes a frame.  It took a lot of work and some mistakes to arrive at our solution, but the result is a pretty insane commercial that I’m really proud of.

Zach and I

Pracitcal Leg

Universal on Fire

Role: 3D VFX Artist, on-set Supervision and Reference, Pre-Viz, Cloth SImulations, Asset Creation and Management, Animation, Tracking

This was an exciting commercial to work on. Firstly, working with Zach Snyder was a great experience. I’m a comic book geek and zombie movie lover so he and I had a lot to talk about. I got the scoop on Watchmen before it was filmed and he even gave me a 300 movie poster autographed. On-set I took HDRs, references for textures and consulted on particularly tricky FX shots with my coworker James LeBloch. Before shooting we had created a pre-viz of the whole commercial in great detail using the final mocap, so on the shoot it was straight-forward to get the right angles and timing becaue it was already worked out. The stunts were the trickiest part.

After filming, the pre-viz was placed in the tracked plates, creating what we call “mid-viz”. Having a commercial that was essentially locked for timing and animation was a huge help in his huge spot. We created a second skin for our giant that would allow the characters to have secondary movement as the goliath stomped down the streets of LA. Do do this we used maya’s NCloth solver.

The next part was to parse through our massive amount of reference photos, create CG versions of actors, hundreds of variations of clothes and people, stitch HDRs and start lighting the scenes. I also managed the asset library and assited CG lead James LeBloch in keeping our large team on task.

In massive, artist Phillip Hartman and James LeBloch attached a thousand small CG people, dynamically to our clothy giant and another group of artists began rendering the shots, via Air.

Ridin' the dome.

Reference Ball

Lighting Reference

Billboard Design

Role: CG Lead, On-set Supervising and Reference, Modeling, Lighting and Rendering, Illustration,Scripting, Tracking

Details: This was my second CG Lead job and it was a great one. After the background plates were shot, we tracked them and created a mid-viz allowing us to program a motion control greenscreen half sphere with the actor on it. I led a team of 8 talented 3D VFX artists and with producer Rich Rama wrangled this 50- FX shot pinball extravaganza. The key to this job was organization, the effects in each shot were very similarly created so in the beginning many tasks could be doled out done assembly line style. Tracking and creating a mid-viz, in order to lock timing and speed was the first task. While this was happening R and D was being done on getting proper reflections and render look. Having a fully reflective sphere flying and boncing through a scene required us to model nearly every object the ball comes near, projecting textures, to get accurate reflections. We came up with many tricks that have become a part of our daily arsenal on this project.

Once things were roughed in, we needed to rig a ball to have proper rotation for the way it was moving. Dynamic simulations weren’t really going to work for this job because the timing had to be so perfectly choreographed and sometimes we wanted the ball to do things that it probably wouldn’t have really done. Hand animation was what 90% of the ball’s movement was.  I was heavily involved in the lighting and rendering side making sure the shots were consistent and of the highest quality.

At the very end we pulled off an impressive spot, worked reasonable hours and no weekends, and I got to do a cool illustration of the pinball scoreboard at the end of the spot. Oh, and it was nominated for an Emmy!  It’s been airing regularly for 2 years now.

Later on that year Autodesk came to interview us about the process.