ByDennis Oda, Star-Bulletin
Editor and 3-D animator Stan Chang works on an upcoming
commercial at McHale Videofilm's studios.
In the audience was Tom Sellers, chief executive and creative director of Sellers Inc., who immediately thought of one of his clients.
"I guess a light bulb went off in his head," said Stan Chang, animator and editor at McHale.
The result is the 3-D animated commercial for Meadow Gold Dairies Hawaii that is now airing on local television stations. Cartons of Meadow Gold products dance out of a refrigerator, sail in front of a woman, twisting and flexing to the beat of a jingle.
Three years ago McHale Videofilm invested $150,000 in Silicon Graphics Inc. computer equipment with a hefty 10 gigabytes of hard disk space, 129 megabytes of RAM, a massive digital control panel, rendering programs and a wall of monitors.
With that equipment and Sellers Inc.'s ideas, the companies came up with a locally produced commercial that cost much less than if it had been made on the mainland, Sellers said. Those involved won't say how much it cost, for competitive reasons, but they said a similar effort, such as a Pillsbury Doughboy commercial, would cost up to $1 million to make on the mainland.
After McHale's presentation, "Tom called me and said he has this wild idea about having Meadow Gold milk and juice cartons, ice cream, yogurt, Meadow Gold's full line, dancing in some poor woman's refrigerator."
That's where the high-tech equipment came into play.
"The hard part was inputting all the shots into my computer and marrying live action to the computer-generated Meadow Gold products," Chang said.
"It's very time consuming. Every object needs to be animated separately, then rendered over a number of hours," he said.
Rendering is the process by which a computer takes geometric "wireframe" skeletons of an object and fills them out into 3-D pictures .
McHale director Roy Kimura ran the live action and put the whole product together.
Chang has already started the animation for a second spot, featuring a 3-D orange with popping, rolling eyes. More are expected.
For the technically minded, the team used Alias Power Animator software to get the Meadow Gold shield and logo dancing across the screen and Photoshop and Quantel Paintbox software on Macintosh and SGI computers for other effects.
The SGI machines did the processing work, aided by a component digital editing bay with four digital disk recorders and three digital Sony Betacam decks.
It takes a close look to see what all of that achieved. Chang points to reflections on counter tops, for example, created by inverting and darkening the images of the dancing products, and appropriately angled shadows added after the images were in place.