Tetrapak "Forests" Commercial at The Moving Picture Company, London
When producing the Tetrapak "Forests" commercial in November 2003, The Moving Picture Company?s highly regarded commercials division relied on mokey for some particularly tough cleanup jobs. On a motion control shot at 3 second exposures there were streaks of traffic lights, blurs of people walking, light flickers and shadows that had to be removed seamlessly. According to Darren Christie, Inferno Artist at MPC; "A few of us had a go at it, initially we tried a few tricks using Combustion, Commotion and then Inferno, but nothing seemed to be giving us the result we wanted. Even painting frame by frame and tracking in stills seemed to prove unsuccessful and too time consuming." It was at this point Christie remembered a magazine review of mokey and decided to try it out, "...we were sceptical at first but I gave it an hour or two and to our surprise mokey was tracking and cleaning up everything for us perfectly." This prompted MPC to upgrade all existing licenses to mokey version 3.
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For the motion control shot they isolated the different elements, such as buildings, the bridge, ground, background etc. in the tracker. Then they selected the various streaks of light, cars etc. and used the ?remove module? to clean the shot. "I wouldn't like to think how long it would have taken if mokey wasn't used... especially since I spent a day trying to clean-up a particular shot and only got 10 frames of a 120 frame shot done. I put it through mokey whilst I moved on with other shots and it was practically done in one afternoon - quite depressing actually when you spend all that time painting frame by frame and mokey does it with ease," said Christie.
The Tetrapak success has accelerated use of mokey at MPC. It is now used regularly in conjunction with their other compositing tools, Combustion, Commotion, Shake, Fire and Inferno and has been used on several projects this year, including the trailer for BBC television series "Hustle" (stabilisation), on various Curry's commercials (mattes and clean-up), in a Heineken commercial (tracking and a small amount of clean-up), Schwartz (mattes and clean-up), and also in the Tango "Buddies" and "Trainers" adverts (rig removal).
When asked what he sees as the key elements of mokey Christie replied: "Tracking and stabilising definitely, being able to export tracking data is a HUGE advantage." mokey has become a useful day to day tool for Christie and he sees it as part of his toolset - "I find myself using all the mokey modules with great success but even at times when a shot proves too difficult for mokey, it still manages to get me at least half way there, and I then do the rest in Inferno or Combustion. Either way it still saves a great deal of time and gets me great results for matting and clean-up without painstaking frame by frame painting and rotoing - two thumbs up!"