
Butternut Space Time 15 sec movie - 160x120 - butter.avi
- [1.1Mb]



- This is a frame from a TV ad for Butternut Bread. I
created around 12 or so of these 15 second spots. This is
my favourite. The background action, and a series of
these ads were created by PM Creative, of Toronto,
Ontario, who had the original contract for doing these
ads. Then I convinced the company I could do them with
Lightwave, and we got the contract. The background was
exactly the same for all the ads.
- I had done one piece before this which was used in a
corporate video, proving we had the technology to do the
work. The first six of these ads were the first TV work I
did in Lightwave. I animated all foreground action for
all of the ads that I was involved in. This included
lottery balls, lots of moving text, sports balls, even
one where I shook the background by rendering the images
on a rectangle, and shaking it at the appropriate time.
- This was when I learned about field rendering.
We rendered a test-ad with side-scrolling text, and the
text was unreadable. So Steve Cook, our video tech guy,
who was invaluable at helping render all of the ads we
did, discovered the field rendering
button. We turned it on, did another render, and were
astounded at the sudden clarity of the text. If you
haven't tried this, do it. Run a piece of text across the
screen in Lightwave, lay it down to video, and try to
read it. Then turn the field rendering button on, and do
it again. The difference it made was the difference
between getting the contract or not. If we couldn't
render a simple side-scroll you could read, we weren't
going to be able to do the job. Field Rendering saved the
day, and for video, I've never turned it off. (Field
Rendering takes a scene and renders every second line, of
a scene, moves the scene a HALF A FRAME, and renders the
odd lines. This mimics how video is done, and basically
allows you 60 frames per second on video, rather than 30.
The vertical resolution suffers, but not much, since
that's the way video works on a CRT anyway. It looks
fine.)
- Each ad had a theme, and was to be placed during certain
television shows. The one above was meant for shows like Star
Trek: The Next Generation. This particular ad's
concept, a UFO beaming up the word Butternut, made
it extremely appropriate for the show The X-Files.
And bitter irony was heaped upon me when in Newfoundland,
where the spots ran, during the much-awaited premier of
season two of The X-Files, NTV, which carried the
show, decided to play a sports oriented
ad from this set. Go figure!







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