This is particularly evident in Tylers most recently completed project for Fox Sports. A conversation with Fox Sports producer, Mason Jurchisin, detailed the rivalry between the LA Lakers and Boston Celtics as being historically volatile. This provided the impetus for Tyler to set about creating “a sort of a war-zone concept” for the 45 second introduction to their upcoming clash. Tyler began by building a partially destroyed landscape littered with a series of discarded televisions, which would eventually show footage from past Lakers Celtics games. The final environment however, depicted a post-nuclear apocalyptic scene rather than a traditional war-zone. As with most unusual projects there were several specific challenges. Firstly, the animation needed eight different clips to be playing simultaneously as the camera panned from one television set to another, focusing on each for only a few seconds. CINEMA 4D’s camera paths and timing were finalized before adding the clips to the televisions, each of which was assigned a temporary number from 1-8. Tyler then did an initial “render as editor” and gave the output to Mason who used it as a timing guide to edit the eight clips according to what footage he wanted to be showing on each of the screens when the camera was focused on them. Mason then set the filename of each edited clip to correspond with the appropriate number of the television (i.e. clip01.mov). This allowed Tyler to use the clips as textures and drop them onto the corresponding televisions. “I’d never had occasion to assign QuickTime movies larger than 1 gig and was wondering if CINEMA 4D and Net would handle the files, which were over 2 GB each”, Tyler explains. Thankfully this proved to be no trouble at all.

Celtics Lakers War Zone part 1

Another challenge Tyler faced, was introducing particles and consistent fire and smoke effects throughout the entire footage without sacrificing render speed. The solution came by separately rendering up to six seconds of various PyroCluster (CINEMA 4D’S fire, smoke and haze module) and particle animations with alpha channels, and then setting them up in seamless loops in After Effects. The output was used as animated textures mapped to flat planes in CINEMA 4D. “In other words, all the fire, explosions, and distant smoke stacks were totally flat, as are the fronts of the televisions and most of the structures”, Tyler explains. With rendering complete the footage was brought into After Effects and white diffusion was added to soften the overall appearance.

Celtics Lakers War Zone part 2