---

Ikea Chair was our latest collaboration with Toronto based director Mark Zibert and Leo Burnett Toronto. Our challenge was to help Mark create a highly creative and technically ambitious one take spot.

We helped build and design an almost 360 degree, 27 second motion controlled move, all while having to animate furniture assembling, control and create a repeatable light (sun) and also have live talent hit marks. Sounds intense? It was, but we loved every moment of it.

We began the journey collecting great reference and instantly jumped right into pre-production. A ton of phone calls, technical discussions, storyboards, animatics and finally we created a 3d Previz that we used to plan out the TechnoDolly move that preformed flawlessly over two days of shooting more that 160 passes combined with a motion controlled keylight(sun) representing dawn until dusk. We needed to build and keep track of animation zones each with separate dope sheets. We also created rough edits on set to make sure no passes were missed and nothing was misaligned.

Once production wrapped, we began the offline process. All the passes needed to be ingested and sorted. We worked closely with Panic and Bob’s Michelle Czukar to push the creative forward while trying to keep the technical challenges to a minimum.

We began work utilizing our linear exr workflow, we camera matched the motion control move, rotoscoped windows, people and objects. We built, timed out and roto’d all of the animated elements. Rig removed dolly tracks, and created outdoor matte paintings. Using our onset measurements, textures and corresponding set plans, we built the northern wall and dresser in 3d. The initial colour and lookdev that was set with Wade Odlum and agency creatives helped keep our look consistent throughout the entire colour and VFX roundtrip. We passed final comps back to Wade for final grade.

CHECK OUT SPOT, PREVIZ and the VFX BREAKDOWN….

---

AGENCY - Leo Burnett
PRODUCER - Franca Piacente & Shannon Farrell
ART DIRECTOR - Fernando Hernandez
COPYWRITER - Morgan Kurchak

PROD HOUSE - Skin & Bones
DIRECTOR - Mark Zibert
DOP - Mattias Rudh
EDITORIAL - Panic & Bob
EDITOR - Michelle Czukar

COLOUR & VFX - alter ego
EXECUTIVE PRODUCER - Cheyenne Bloomfield
VFX PRODUCER - Hilda Pereira
VFX SUPERVISOR - Andres Kirejew
CG SUPERVISOR - Gene Dreitser
COMPOSITORS - Andres Kirejew & Andrew Thiessen & Eileen Peng
ROTOSCOPING - Andrew Thiessen & Eric Perrella & Holden Mohring & Alexa Salsberg
CG ANIMATOR - Eileen Peng
PREVIS ARTISTS - Gene Dreitser & Eileen Peng & Andres Kirejew
COLOURIST - Wade Odlum