Graphics Packages for 2009 Creative Arts Emmy, VMA and CMA Award Shows

New York-based Mantra Design has been making graphics for the Country Music Association Awards for the past three years. For November’s show, they used MAXON’s CINEMA 4D and Adobe After Effects to create performance looks for 13 different artists, including Taylor Swift, Tim McGraw, Lady Antebellum and Darius Rucker.

The goal, says Anna Toonk, a senior producer at Mantra, was to come up with content that supported and enhanced the artists’ songs without overwhelming their performances.

Christopher McCard, a designer and animator, was one of 10 Mantra artists who spent three weeks working on the project (See Mantra’s reel here: www.mantradesign.tv). The look he did for Tim McGraw was particularly heavy on 3D, so he used C4D for the most part while other, more 2D-focused packages, were made with After Effects.

Against a dark sky, a brick building flanked by water towers is illuminated by lights near the roofline that cast an eerie glow in the surrounding fog. Above the top-floor windows, huge red letters spell out “Southern Voice,” the title of McGraw’s latest album. McCard used CINEMA 4D to build the top floor and then used MAXON’s MoGraph Module to clone the floors below. “It made it much easier to create something so huge,” says McCard, who has been using C4D for nearly 3 years.

A Surreal New York for the VMAs

For the third year in a row, LA-based Prologue Films did the graphics package for the MTV Video Music Award Show. Directed by Prologue’s Ilya Abulhanov, this year’s package had a New York theme with graphics aimed at conveying a surreal, slightly grittier picture of the city than the glossy image usually offered up in movie and TV fare. In addition to all of the in-house looks, Prologue artists also did performance graphics for Pink.

The project began with the development of a logo that combined the MTV logo with an array of urban elements like cables, antennas, stairways and bridge, as well as pipes, flags and traffic lights. (The final 3D logo weighed in at 173,756 polygons.) Those same elements were then incorporated into motion graphics that continually transform the city landscape as oversize traffic lights seem to grow out of nowhere and gondolas glide high above the streets.

At first, the plan was to make everything in 2D using After Effects. But Prologue artist, Takayuki Sato, thought it would make the graphics much more interesting if he used CINEMA 4D to do them in 3D, so he gave it a try. “I used a lot of reference images and imagined some things in my head before I started modeling,” Sato explains. “But once I showed things to Ilya, he agreed that it looked better so we decided to do a lot more 3D.”

Sato also used C4D to make most of the lower thirds for the show in which he combined and animated elements he had modeled with graphics from other Prologue Artists. “I was able to work really fast because it was so easy to export all the data from CINEMA to After Effects,” he explains (Check out parts of the graphics package in the television section of Prologue’s Web site: prologue.com).

Emmy Goes 3D

When Scott Bryant, founder of Santa Monica-based Steam designed the graphics package for the 2008 Creative Arts Emmy Award show, he used images of the Emmy statuette shot with a Red One camera in studio. They looked good, but he couldn’t help thinking of how easy it would have been to offer clients different options if he had modeled the award in 3D. “You know how it goes,” he says. “You go into post production and you wish you had shot things differently because the client wants a different angle, but it just costs too much to do another shoot so you work with what you have.”

Though he had never used CINEMA 4D before, Bryant had heard positive things about the software from his friend Zee Nederlander of LA-based Empire Studios. So when Bryant was asked to do the Emmy’s again this year, he called Nederlander for some pointers and decided to give it a try. After hiring local 3D artist Joe Paniaqua to make a high-resolution model of the Emmy statuette, Bryant imported the model in C4D and began texturing. He learned as he worked. “It didn’t take me very long to have that Emmy looking really good,” he recalls. As he continues to take tutorials, he is looking at ways to use CINEMA 4D to create virtual sets. “I do a lot of TV commercials and we’re going to have to get crafty in the future about how to reduce costs, so 3D may be the answer.” (See Bryant’s reel here: www.steamshow.com).

Everyone noticed the difference in the quality of the award images right away, Bryant says. In fact, they were so impressed they asked him to contribute elements to be used on the screens around the stage. When Bryant arrived at the show, he was amazed to see that images of different parts of his 3D Emmy had been blown up as large as six feet by six feet and peppered all over the stage (See some of Steam’s Emmy work here: vimeo.com/8035395).

Meleah Maynard is a Minneapolis-based freelance writer and editor. Contact her at her website: www.slowdog.com.