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In the TV commercial "Kosuke Kitajima - The Olympic Games" version for the "Aquarius" drink, we combined the shots recorded underwater and the air bubbles created with computer graphics (CG).

※	TV commercial "Kosuke Kitajima - The Olympic Games" version for the "Aquarius" drink was on air from June 21, 2004 all over Japan.

An under water blimp which accommodated an ARRI camera

Shooting of this commercial was mostly performed underwater. As it takes longer than usual shooting sessions to change rolls and lenses during underwater shooting, and the time allowed to shoot with Mr. Kitajima was limited, we made more careful preparations for the session. We used a stand-in to make a lot of trial dives into a diving pool before determining the direction to jump in and the position of the camera. White curtains were put on the walls of the pool for superimposing at a later stage and to achieve better lighting effects. In this condition, it is difficult to sense distances, so we made a shooting plan considering safety for Mr. Kitajima. Mr. Pete Romano, an Oscar-winning cameraman who is an expert of underwater shooting was in charge of the shots. Mr. Romano reduced the time necessary for set-up by using a hand-held camera. During the shooting , we imported the shots recorded with a Visicon camera into a laptop PC and did offline editing on the spot with AVID XpressDV.

Scenes actually shot underwater

The first process after the shooting was to reproduce the movements of the camera and Mr. Kitajima with a 3D digital camera and a digital swimmer as a match move process to the actual shots. This process was used for creation of CG air bubbles. As we used a hand-held camera, and it was not possible to locate sufficient markers for tracking movements as we do for usual shooting, it became a difficult process. Markers placed in an interval of 1 meter on ropes which were sunk in the water using weights were used as the basis for this process. The movements of Mr. Kitajima were reproduced by using Rotoscope.

Digital swimmer which reproduced movements of Mr. Kitajima

As the actual shots were simple, how we arranged and superimposed elements became important. 2D composites were handled by Mr. Daisuke Kawamura, Compositer of IMAGICA. Mr. Kawamura participated in this project from the preproduction stage, and supervised the shooting session as VFX Supervisor on the spot. After the shooting, mattes were prepared to exchange with the actual background shots. White clothes were used to simplify this process, but it was impossible to create a matte with an automated process because there were air bubbles, so we created it manually.

Live action and manually created matte

Creation of air bubbles by CG was performed simultaneously with the creation of mats. Air bubbles were generated by using a particle system based on the movements of a digital swimmer. In this process, we created air bubbles with exaggerated movements which are impossible in the real world as well as ones with natural movements as in live action shots. This was done to meet the director's request that he wanted some kind of playful feeling utilizing the characteristics of CG. As the images of these materials changed significantly depending on how they were arranged and combined, we created CG elements as flexible as possible to allow a wide range of adjustments by the director during the final superimposing process using INFERNO. Concretely, we gave each RGB channel of images specific information such as edges, shading and highlights to allow adjustment of the texture of CG air bubbles by combining these elements during the superimposing process. We also adjusted the refraction of the background caused by air bubbles during the superimposing process by using these elements.

These elements were divided during editing before use

Digital swimmer and CG air bubbles

PDF Download：aquarius_making_E.pdf

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	Oct/2005


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