The Chain

The ad sees the irresistible allure of Axe Anarchy stop men and women in their tracks, unleashing a chain reaction of chaos that results in a giant car crash, plus some excitable cheerleaders. Supervised by Framestore’s Alex Thomas over a week in Buenos Aires, the initial VFX brief was to provide clean-up and embellish a few scenes with CG helicopters, boats and birds. But as the potential of using visual effects to create even more chaos became more apparent, the VFX brief grew, eventually covering every shot in the 60-second edit.

Framestore worked collaboratively with BBH’s creative team, Szymon Rose and Daniel Schaefer, and Creative Driector David Kolbusz. 'The initial concept and script was incredibly exciting to be involved with from the start', explains Helen Hughes, Head of Production and Producer for Framestore. 'Coupled with Tom Kuntz’s vision, we wanted our effects to help support great narrative and performance. Tom really elevated the whole idea with his treatment. For Framestore, it was a real pleasure to work with such a creative and motivated team.'

David, Daniel, Szymon and agency producer Ruben Mercadal were deeply involved with the post production, regularly reviewing work from Framestore’s London office, while LA-based Tom Kuntz supplied online feedback. To further aid the transatlantic workflow, which included a virtual grade between LA and London, Framestore adjusted its colour pipeline to employ the use of log scans. This meant full colour range was available in the final data grade with all composited VFX.

'The effects are all invisible and set back', commented Framestore’s lead 2D artist, Pedro Sabrosa. 'But they belie a lot of work and detail to augment what’s going on in the background. Because Tom Kuntz is a master performance director, our role was very much to provide support in VFX form, helping the effects to get bigger and bigger as the chaos unfolds.'

Framestore ended up crafting many unscripted VFX, with most scenes requiring extensive compositing of multiple plates in order to match-up best performances. The scene where a bike crashes through a shop front is a good example of the level of perfectionism that runs throughout the commercial. This scene firstly required several mixed plates in order to get the glass to smash correctly and the bike to enter perfectly. It also entailed integrated smoke plates that could react to the CG birds’ movements, a rebuilt shop front, retimed glass, interior clean-up to remove distracting props, set stabilising and foreground clean-up.

Similarly intensive scenes included a statue being knocked off its plinth by a crashing car, in which separate plates were used to combine perfectly timed actions; this shot also required torso replacement of a policeman to ensure consistent lighting. Equally, the final crash scene involves a bus that was reanimated to create a more dynamic fall. Framestore’s 2D team was also responsible for setting fire to trees, which were built from shot footage of lit branches on set in combination with fire elements taken from Framestore’s archive roll. In fact, the only visible in-camera fire came from the clown. The final scene, where a painter calmly captures the city’s chaos from afar, was based on a living matte painting with a skyline built from scratch.

The main CG task came in the form of birds. Framestore’s initial brief entailed a bigger role for the CG birds, so the production gave Framestore’s CG team an opportunity to overhaul its CG feather system. The previous system was based on an overly-complex code and used Renderman. This was stripped back and rebuilt from the ground up in order to be ‘future friendly’. It was designed by Diarmid Harrison-Murray over a month and a half, borrowing fundamental ideas from the original but using Houdini and Mantra for rendering. The result is a first-class and unique system that is capable of building breathtakingly detailed birds with photo-real feathers; feathers being even harder than fur when it comes to creating CG authenticity.

The birds were built to a very detailed and hi-res photo real spec so that there was flexibility to use them at full-screen size if required. Helicopters, a police boat and a parade balloon were also built in CG to further support and enhance the commercial’s main 2D effects.