Artists Use CINEMA 4D to Make Graphics Packages for 2009 Creative Arts Emmy, VMA and CMA Award Shows

By Meleah Maynard

New York-based Mantra Design has been making graphics for the Country Music Association Awards for the past three years. For November’s show, they used MAXON’s CINEMA 4D and Adobe After Effects to create performance looks for 13 different artists, including Taylor Swift, Tim McGraw, Lady Antebellum and Darius Rucker. The goal, says Anna Toonk, a senior producer at Mantra, was to come up with content that supported and enhanced the artists’ songs without overwhelming their performances.

Christopher McCard, a designer and animator at Mantra, used Illustrator to import a vector outline of the type for this scene. “I love that feature,” he says. “I use it on a daily basis and it works perfectly every single time.”

Christopher McCard, a designer and animator, was one of 10 Mantra artists who spent three weeks working on the project. (See Mantra’s reel here: www.mantradesign.tv.) The look he did for Tim McGraw was particularly heavy on 3D, so he used C4D for the most part while other, more 2D-focused packages, were made with After Effects. Using creative briefs from Robert Deaton, executive producer of the CMA award show and Lee Lodge, creative producer, as well as reference images of buildings, water towers and staircases, McCard created a moody, urban opener.

Tim McGraw’s show opener needed to have a city feel with a strong typography element. McCard used MAXON’s MoGraph Module to replicate floors of the building.

Against a dark sky, a brick building flanked by water towers is illuminated by lights near the roofline that cast an eerie glow in the surrounding fog. Above the top-floor windows, huge red letters spell out “Southern Voice,” the title of McGraw’s latest album. McCard used CINEMA 4D to build the top floor and then used MAXON’s MoGraph Module to clone the floors below. “It made it much easier to create something so huge,” says McCard, who has been using C4D for nearly 3 years.

The textured sky was animated in C4D to make it look as if the clouds were moving.

McCard also used CINEMA 4D to do most of the lighting for the look, including the volumetric lights that made it look as if some light was coming from the city street below. While he used C4D’s Xpresso to make the streetlights flicker quite a bit in early versions of the look, the effect was mostly cut from the final product for fear it was “just too much,” McCard says. Fog was done in After Effects, as well as color correction.

A Surreal New York for the VMAs

For the third year in a row, LA-based Prologue Films did the graphics package for the MTV Video Music Award Show. Directed by Prologue’s Ilya Abulhanov, this year’s package had a New York theme with graphics aimed at conveying a surreal, slightly grittier picture of the city than the glossy image usually offered up in movie and TV fare. In addition to all of the in-house looks, Prologue artists also did performance graphics for Pink.

Prologue created a surreal version of the New York landscape as the backdrop for this year’s VMA awards.

The project began with the development of a logo that combined the MTV logo with an array of urban elements like cables, antennas, stairways and bridge, as well as pipes, flags and traffic lights. (The final 3D logo weighed in at 173,756 polygons.) Those same elements were then incorporated into motion graphics that continually transform the city landscape as oversize traffic lights seem to grow out of nowhere and gondolas glide high above the streets.

For this lower third, Sato combined all of the animation in After Effects, including the red billboard made by another Prologue artist. Objects protruding from the right side of the billboard were created in C4D specifically for this shot.

At first, the plan was to make everything in 2D using After Effects. But Prologue artist, Takayuki Sato, thought it would make the graphics much more interesting if he used CINEMA 4D to do them in 3D created, so he gave it a try. “I used a lot of reference images and imagined some things in my head before I started modeling,” Sato explains. “But once I showed things to Ilya, he agreed that it looked better so we decided to do a lot more 3D.”

The subdued color palette chosen by director Ilya Abulhanov helps set the mood for the dream-like changes to the city’s landscape.

Sato also used C4D to make most of the lower thirds for the show in which he combined and animated elements he had modeled with graphics from other Prologue Artists. “I was able to work really fast because it was so easy to export all the data from CINEMA to After Effects,” he explains.

Prologue briefly considered doing the graphics package in 2D before opting for 3D to enhance depth and make things more interesting.

With six weeks to complete the whole project, Prologue’s creative team developed a two-stage process with three people handing the shooting of live-action footage and then 11 more doing design, animation and post production work. Sato describes the city’s fast-paced evolution as coming together in a “Transformer way,” but the result is much more complex and subtle than that with industrial, and sometimes bizarre (a floating astronaut), elements appearing at unexpected moments. (Check out parts of the graphics package in the television section of Prologue’s Web site: http://prologue.com.)

Emmy Goes 3D

When Scott Bryant, founder of Santa Monica-based Steam designed the graphics package for the 2008 Creative Arts Emmy Award show, he used images of the Emmy statuette shot with a Red One camera in studio. They looked good, but he couldn’t help thinking of how easy it would have been to offer clients different options if he had modeled the award in 3D. “You know how it goes,” he says. “You go into post production and you wish you had shot things differently because the client wants a different angle, but it just costs too much to do another shoot so you work with what you have.”

Steam founder, Scott Bryant, was amazed at how real his 3D Emmy look on the screens behind the stage at this year’s show.

Though he had never used CINEMA 4D before, Bryant had heard positive things about the software from his friend Zee Nederlander of LA-based Empire Studios. So when Bryant was asked to do the Emmy’s again this year, he called Nederlander for some pointers and decided to give it a try. After hiring local 3D artist Joe Paniaqua to make a high-resolution model of the Emmy statuette, Bryant imported the model in C4D and began texturing. He learned as he worked. “It didn’t take me very long to have that Emmy looking really good,” he recalls. As he continues to take tutorials, he is looking at ways to use CINEMA 4D to create virtual sets. “I do a lot of TV commercials and we’re going to have to get crafty in the future about how to reduce costs, so 3D may be the answer.” (See Bryant’s reel here: www.steamshow.com.)

This final frame of the show’s opening sequence “is a great example of how easy it was for me to throw things into the CINEMA 4D world,” says Bryant.

Everyone noticed the difference in the quality of the award images right away, Bryant says. In fact, they were so impressed they asked him to contribute elements to be used on the screens around the stage. When Bryant arrived at the show, he was amazed to see that images of different parts of his 3D Emmy had been blown up as large as six feet by six feet and peppered all over the stage.

Normally, the network does the parade of stills of the presenters but this year they asked Bryant to do it because he was able to work so quickly using a combination of C4D and After Effects.

There was even a giant 3D version of the Emmy orb behind the presenter stand that Bryant thought was real until he was able to look more closely after the show. “Everything looked so real,” he says. “It felt good to have my work be reflected even beyond the video screens and I was fooled by my own stuff.” (See some of Steam’s Emmy work here: http://vimeo.com/8035395.)

Meleah Maynard is a Minneapolis-based freelance writer and editor. Contact her at her website: www.slowdog.com