The visual effects team for Smoke & Mirrors New York (SMNY) recreated the classic Beatles Abbey Road album cover and then brought that moment to life for 30-second and 60-second spots promoting the MTV videogame The Beatles: Rock Band.
While it looks as if this fantasy were captured on film, the reality is that SMNY—the New York studios of famed visual effects house Smoke & Mirrors in the UK—created this illusion using Autodesk Flame visual effects and compositing software, Autodesk Smoke software for editing, and Autodesk Softimage and Maya software for 3D animation. The team’s Autodesk pipelines have further expanded with the addition of Autodesk Flare software.
Both of the Beatles: Rock Band spots recreate the moment the Beatles—John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr—walk single-file across the striped crosswalk of London’s Abbey Road. Cut to the song “Come Together” from Abbey Road, the spots show the Beatles stopping in the middle of the street and beginning to interact with people who show up. The crowd, which now stretches up the sidewalk and beyond, crosses the road behind the Beatles to the music’s beat. At the end, the steady stream of people speeds up into streaks of light that resolve into the tag promoting the game.
The SMNY creative team—including Nic Seresin, lead visual effects/Flame artist and visual effects supervisor; Senior Flame artist Phil Akka; CD Sean Broughton; Chief Engineer Simon Hester; and Flame Artists Stephanie Isaacson and Sam Caine—spent an intense five weeks developing, compositing and finishing the ads, the longer of which had more shots but the same storyline. This project marks the first time Autodesk Flare was ever used on set during a shoot […]
via How Smoke & Mirrors New York brought The Beatles’ Abbey Road album cover to life.
