2014 Winners & Shortlists

Brief Explanation

Qatar Foundation’s mission is to make Qatar a leader in innovative education, science, research and community development. To do this QF needs to create global awareness for itself and Qatar as a whole. FC Barcelona is more than just a football club, and although being very different entities, both QF and FC Barcelona are united in their shared values around Education and Community Development. The film aims to bring this partnership to life with spectacular images: Whether we’re scientists exploring the mysteries oft he universe, teachers unlocking the potential of young minds or athletes on a championship quest – passion drives us all.

Creative Execution

The effects were broken into two main parts. The first part involved objects traveling across the globe, interacting with the environment, and eventually reaching the Camp Nou stadium. The second part was the particle effects forming and emanating from the FC Barcelona football stars. The traveling objects were created in Maya and rendered with VRay. We camera tracked a number of shots, recreating the camera and key scene geometry in 3D, which allowed us to insert our own elements into the scenes. A team of artists worked with over 100 assets, to populate the scenes and seamlessly blend them into the environments. Many objects, such as books and data, were hand key framed to get a precise trajectory, according to the director's vision. The particle effects on the athletes proved to be the most challenging aspect of the job. All of the particle work in the football section was done with Houdini. We developed a Houdini instance asset that allowed a Technical Director to update props for the entire show, without any artist intervention. If we wanted 30% of the particles to be soccer balls, 20% violins, 15% microscopes, etc. we could easily dial that in. Our system allowed us to paint emission areas directly on the matchmoved mesh and decide precisely where effects would happen. We had four main parts to the player simulations. There were long, flowing trails that emitted from small sections of the body, usually positioned to get nice ribbons of solid color (such as from the shoes, shirt sleeves, jersey numbers, etc.) To create beautiful swirling streams of particles, we put the player geometry through a smoke simulation and used that velocity data to advect our particles. This same velocity data was reused for a dissolve simulation, where parts of the players would break up and regenerate along art-directed edges. To help with the edge integration of the particles we created an edge aura asset, which would calculate the surface normals’ orientation, with respect to the camera, and emit particles only from the perpendicular faces. Our final layer was an all-over surface particle pass, which we could use in comp to bring particles back anywhere over the players we needed them. Nuke was essential for our matte painting and set extension work. The football players were originally shot in their empty practice stadium (under various lighting coditions), which we had to replace with a fully packed Camp Nou. From high resolution stills and video acquired at a FCB league game, we built geometry and did projections in Nuke for all of the crowd and stadium work. Pretty much everything except the ground directly under the athletes was a matte painting/set extension.