Before coming to work at Moonbot Studios, where I am now, I was working at psyop in LA. It was a bit surreal because I can remember only a few years ago I found their website with all of their work and was very impressed. It was at a time when I had no clue how that stuff was made and I thought it must be a cool place to work and, at that time, they had a very minimalist website that didn’t say much about them, which added to the allure.
So after my stint in San Francisco, I went to LA and worked at psyop for about two months doing previs. That means I laid everything out in 3D and planned all the shots and did rough animation to get timing. I worked on commercials for Intel, Under Amour, but mostly worked on this Bundaberg Red spot.
I enjoyed previs because I got to work on the ground floor of the decisions being made. For example, the directors emphasized the need for a grimy and dirty river bottom filled with trash, so I put in a toilet bowl for the fish to swim through. This previs was especially important because they actually built a river bottom set based off my 3D previs and used my layout and camera moves as a guide on how to shoot the footage on the actual set that they built. Only the fish and the tongue are CG.
The set was built by New Deal Studio who worked on films like Hugo and Inception, as you can see in the commercial, they did a fantastic job.