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Filed under: Interactive •Motion Graphics •

Playing Squash: Blobby Text Effect for NBC

Back in 1997 - still fairly early in our motion graphics career - one of our more enjoyable gigs was creating promotionals for NBC. These promos didn’t appear on television; they were destined for the Big Screen - namely, NBC’s huge AstroVision screen in Times Square. Rather than showing upcoming episodes of specific shows, they often took the form of puzzles, trivia, and other bits of information about their stars (see the sidebar “Multithreaded Information” for more musings on that subject). As a result, each clip usually took the form of a simple animation or site gag. Well, they look simple - some of them took a bit of thought to pull off. This is the story of one of those gags.

The Mondo Shoot

For their own promotional work, NBC regularly gathers together their stars for what they call the “mondo shoot.” In the earlier, more lighthearted days, this often included filming the actors and actresses performing a number of amusing actions, such as dancing, playing with a giant TV remote, pantomiming catching or throwing away an object, and generally hamming it up; today the look tends to be more serious. Text, show clips, and the ubiquitous NBC Peacock are then later composited with these clips and edited together to create their promos.

Back then, NBC’s promos had an identifiable “look” including a solid white background, compared to the more urban look of today. As a result, most of the mondo clips back then were shot against a seamless white backdrop, or even in a completely white room. In some shots, the talent stood on a translucent floor or ledge, with the camera underneath them or swinging around them. This use of white also happened to make compositing easier: It only took a simple setting of a threshold or levels filter to clear out any imperfections and make the background solid white. Once you have that, it was easy to use a “multiply” blending mode to composite these clips on top of each other; with some further manipulations of their levels and maybe some edge treatments, you could also keep the background white and make the actor solid black, resulting in a quick luminance matte for more complex composites.

Quite often NBC would direct different actors to make the same general move, such as the leaping-towards-the-camera theme that appeared in many of their TV promos during the 1997/1998 season. We looked for these groups when it came time to create headers and bumpers for general classes of clips, such as a certain header style for all the trivia questions. In our case, we were creating a class of clips known as “Hobby Horse” where you try to guess the hobby of a particular star. We decided to use a series of shots of stars trying to squash an imaginary bug on a transparent floor or wall between them and the camera. NBC dubbed us a BetaSP copy (they used D3 internally at the time), we digitized it from our Sony UVW-1800 through our Radius VideoVision SP (an early component video capture system for Macs) onto disk arrays. Even though we had to live with compressed video back then instead of uncompressed D1, the nice thing about the solid color backgrounds was that they were data-efficient and compressed very cleanly.

Mr. Mercury and the Peacock

The other visual requirements for the bumpers were simple: We needed the NBC Peacock (so you could tell what network we were promoting), and we needed the segment name: Hobby Horse. To create a visual hook to grab attention, we decided to have the stars squash the peacock, and then have it to reassemble into the words.

A good After Effects-compatible filter to simulate the “liquid” action of a squash is Mr. Mercury. Back then it was part of the MetaCreations Studio Effects and Final Effects Complete packages; today versions of it come bundled with After Effects as well as with the Boris version of Final Effects Complete (we blogged about the differences between the two back at the end of February). In reality, it is a variation of their other particle effects, in that pieces are ejected from an object, with user control over velocity, gravity, air resistance, etc. What makes Mr. Mercury different is that the pieces are actually warped blobby sections of the original source layer, with some coloration to make them look sorta like blobs of mercury.

Since it is a particle system, experience with other CC or Boris FEC particles can be directly transferred. For example, it pauses two frames before particle start to get ejected, so you have to offset your effected layer appropriately. We wanted particles to squirt away quickly once they appeared, so we cranked up the velocity. However, we didn’t want the blobs to keep flying away; they had to stay in the frame to re-assemble back into the name. So, we moved one second out on the timeline past the squash, and cranked up the viscosity to slow the blobs down after initial ejection. These two parameters take a little balancing against each other; we ended up with settings of velocity = 5.5 and resistance = 0.67.

Caroline (Lea Thompson) and Richard (Malcolm Gets) from the old NBC show “Caroline in the City”, squashing the NBC Peacock.

There are a couple of problems with Mr. Mercury. One is that it is very hard to make the result not look like blobs: You have to really crank up the particle size to much larger than you want for the actual blobs. This makes it hard to go smoothly from an un-blobbed object to a blobby one. We usually end up quickly cross-fading from an untreated to the treated object; in this case, since the action was so fast, we just cut from the straight peacock to the blobbed one, as seen in the sequence above. Second, Mr. Mercury always colorizes the source to try to look more like mercury. This color shift can give away the crossfade. So, we counter-acted it by increasing the saturation and lightness of the object, as seen in the side-by-side comparison below. AE’s old Color Balance HSB filter with settings of lightness = 20 and saturation = 35 worked in that case; today we would have used the newer Hue/Saturation effect.

Mr. Mercury adds colorization to the original object. In the second image, we cranked the lightness and saturation of the peacock back up so it would better match its pre-Mecury state.

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