Poser 5, The Han & Maxwell

Poser 5, The Hand & Maxell:
The Evolution of an Advertisement

BY PHOTOGRAPHER AND DIGITAL ARTIST WILLIAM WHITEHURST

July | August 2004
Issue No.16

Although Poser 5 is used primarily to portray the human form, there are no limits for the inventive artist who knows that less is more. Read on, enjoy, and learn a thing or two. Here’s the progression as described by William Whitehurst: from concept through print, an animated short, and ultimately up in the lights of Times Square.

If you can make in New York, you can make it anywhere. – Eden Maxwell

I’ve been working on print ads for Maxell for several years. Most have been still life photography with some degree of digital effects. In this case, the idea for the ads for 2002 was to depict the future of data storage.

Maxell Ad

This is the Maxell ad that I shot for the 2002 ad campaign. I created a series of three print ads with Robotic arms holding Maxell products. I did both the model making and the photography. The Robot arm and background are made mostly of model kit parts (mainly space ships) sprayed silver and shot with colored gels on the lights. If you look closely, you can see that the wrist is a barbecue fork and the finger pads are the heads of toothbrushes. The shots evolved from a concept showing the robot arm holding the product on a white background. As I built up the background in Adobe Photoshop, I added elements that defined the environment as well.

My art director, Brad Eisenstein of Manhattan Marketing Ensemble, wanted next year’s ad to go one step further with the robot idea. If last year was the Terminator, then this year would be T2 made of liquid metal. I tested ideas in Poser, making a chrome hand that would hold the Maxell DVD and tapes. Fortunately, Poser has right and left hand models that are amazingly detailed. If I had used the Poser figure, and simply zoomed in on a hand, it would have had far less detail, so I photographed my assistant’s hand holding the products. That gave me a record of hand positions. As the illustration progressed, I refined the hand postures in Poser by tweaking the positioning dials.

This screenshot is in Poser 5, (the actual work was done with the Poser 4 Pro Pack, an add-on product for Poser 4 that brings powerful new functionality via a set of plug-ins and updaters. To make the hand appear to be made of chrome, I created the chrome material in Poser’s Material section. The environment that the hand reflects is the recycled background from last year’s ad.

This is an early rendering of the chrome hand with a DVD. I always make several renderings in Poser, with variations of lighting and surfaces, before bringing them into Photoshop layers. I then pick out the detail I like from each layer. The client liked the idea, but thought a virtual hand would work better than a chrome robot one (as if it were just software existing only in virtual space).

I started working with the wireframe view (one of Poser’s 12 display styles) and the chrome image, adding it as a layer in Photoshop. I kept the DVD in the Poser file as a flattened cylinder with its photo added as the Material. Later, the product changed, so I shot a new photo and added it as a layer in Photoshop. Poser 5 can import a photograph as a Material texture. I made 3 files from the photograph of the CD: the straight photograph, the bump map showing which parts were rendered as raised or lowered, and a transparency map that made the hole in the center empty and center ring partly transparent.

I had previously created virtual environments in Poser that were similar to the chrome hand, but neither hand or product stood out enough. I worked with my art director, Brad Eisenstein, to experiment with Poser hands and backgrounds that were less realistic. The idea worked out nicely because the focus was on the DVD, the only real thing in the ad. To position the elements in the layout, I made a mockup of the ad with the hand, DVD, and the layout with the type position. I imported it into Poser as the background picture. I duplicated the flat DVD cylinder and repeated it vertically in space. I added more wireframe models of the cylinders and other objects in the background to give a sense of infinite, virtual space. It was easy to revolve the camera in Poser and move the wireframe elements to get a good-looking view using the type layout.

DVD Ad

This is the final print ad. I made a virtual tower of DVD trays in the background. In Photoshop, I gave the image a bit more depth by using a shadowy, out of focus layer of the blue background photo from the previous year. I added a bit of motion blur to the hand put in the photo of the new DVD, etc. I kept everything I did on a separate layer in Photoshop because there are always last minute changes. It is not unusual for this sort of shot to have upwards of 30 layers.

This is another product ad from the same time. Maxell used my illustrations for three magazine ads.

Click image to play movie

In previous years I had done a short Flash animation using my Photoshop layered files for Maxell to use as a screensaver and as a display at trade shows. I thought this was the perfect time to do another animation using all the Poser models I had done for the print ads. Instead of using flat photographic elements, I could animate all the motion in Poser with the hand moving through space to grab a spinning DVD. I made a short test animation to show them what I could do in Poser. It looked good, but it didn't sell the Maxell product. The client suggested that the hand shows the DVD’s Maxell label to the viewer for a few seconds before inserting the DVD into a virtual tray.

Click image to play movie

The only problem was that I could not get the DVD to render photographically with Poser’s wireframe mode. I experimented with rendering just the hand in wireframe and the DVD realistically. But, I had problems combining these elements and redoing the whole animation twice with every change that had to be made. Wireframe mode also lacked the reflections and ghost-like quality of the virtual hand in the ads. My solution was to use a transparent wire grid on the hand and background; I then rendered the whole thing photo-realistically. For this final movie, the background and all the elements were a straight animation in Poser, which was then exported as a QuickTime movie. After making simple type animations for the beginning and end in Photoshop’s ImageReady, I brought those elements into QuickTime to combine the sequences of type and the sounds with the Poser animation. The final movie was exported in 3 sizes, from full screen to this small example.

The client was so happy with the print ads that a variation of the DVD ad was used for billboards. This is my shot of the billboard in Times Square last year.