Winter Wipeout

ABC's Winter Wipeout show is a ratings leader with a spectacular CG title sequence

Locia TV is a company whose reputation reaches far beyond its hometown of Santiago, Chile. It’s client list even includes ABC Television in the United States. ABC asked Locia TV to also create the second title sequence for its hit reality show “Winter Wipeout”.

After premiering on December 6, Wipeout became an immediate hit on ABC’s Thursday prime-time schedule. If you’re asking yourself what “Winter Wipeout” is, it can be described as a game without limits on ice and in snow: participants must master an obstacle course while dodging snow balls and hockey pucks and avoiding polar bears, which are fortunately only costumed actors.

Locia TV’s creative director Matias Rivera leads a team of highly creative modelers, animators and texture artists. For the title sequence, they created an idealized version of the obstacle course in which the various obstacles were re-recreated as 3D models and textured using BodyPaint 3D.

Even though Matias’ team was given more time to create this sequence, the deadline still loomed. But thanks to the newly installed render farm, meeting this deadline was no problem. Francisco Chaigneau, founder of Locia TV, remembers: “A lot of 3D work was involved, which we were able to master with CINEMA 4D. Compositing was completed in After Effects.”

When the artists at Locia TV started the task of creating and animating the snowballs and how a snowball shatters into a thousand pieces as it hits the logo they were glad they could fall back on a tool like MoGraph. To make the snowball fragments look as realistic as possible they were edited in BodyPaint 3D after they had been textured to add random smudges and splats to emphasize the look.

Locia TV also had the opportunity to add a bit of character animation to both spots. Even though it was clear that the character should not be a dominant part of the spots, ABC requested that a penguin character be created, who was to appear together with the broadcaster’s logo. “Those responsible at ABC liked the idea of having animals in the show. They already had actors in polar bear costumes and the penguin next to the broadcaster’s logo completed the look they wanted”, explained Francisco Chaigneau.

Loica TV Winter Wipeout Clip:
http://loica.tv/2010/media/Winter_Wipeout.mov