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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