Rushes Give Us A Look At Their 'Tiny Worlds'

You Rushes folk are busy people – what made you want to take the time to make your own short?

We're blessed at Rushes to have a highly talented team of creative ops who often move on to their own projects when the working day is done, remarkably they always find the time to pursue their own interests in everything from photography & illustration, to giant pieces of land art. We've always encouraged them to express themselves creatively and aren't averse to putting together in-house projects to enable them to do so, two recent examples being our Christmas Reindeer and Artificial Agent films. With Andy Nicholas having recently joined Rushes to Head up our CG team alongside Senior Exec Producer Norra Abdul Rahim, it was decided to produce something to highlight the team's skills and our new commercials-centric operation.

How did the concept/theme for the micro-films come about?

The project was started at the beginning of this year as the result of a team creative brainstorming session. A number of ideas were suggested but Tiny Worlds won through and captured the imagination and enthusiasm of everyone involved. Once the concept was decided, the ideas were developed further to come up with the three scenarios, and the vehicle design was able to get started.

How were the films put together? What techniques did you use? Who was involved at Rushes?

Once we'd settled on the details of each scenario, we took a Canon 7D out onto the streets of Soho and shot plates in locations which would fit for each vehicle. Most of the depth of field you see was achieved in camera, but it was pushed further in post to get the tilt-shift lens look.

A tricky challenge that had to be solved was how to get the submarine to interact with the live action footage of the puddle. After exploring a few possible solutions, we decided to build the puddle in 3D and carefully recreate the reflections, as seen in the original footage. A ripple simulation was generated in Houdini based on the submarine animation, and everything was carefully blended together in Nuke to make sure that we could keep the reflections of the people as they walked by.

Apart from these water ripples, all the 3D work was done in Maya. That includes the 2D animations for the smoke and submarine wake as this meant that they could interact with the 3D models and be reflected in the water.



The film has elements of realism (live-action plates) overlaid with cartoony effects? Why did you make the decision to combine the looks? How did you decide what would be represented in each way?

This was a key creative decision that we had to make early on. In our tiny universe we had to decide how effects such as smoke, water splashes, explosions, etc. would work at such a small scale. We quickly realised that if we had decided to create the effects in a photo-realistic manner, then things like the torpedo impact would end up looking more like a Chinese-firecracker, rather than the dramatic explosion that we wanted to show. At this point, we decided to use 2D hand animated elements to represent the effects instead. This had the immediate benefit of releasing us from the photo-real constraint and added a stylised feel to the piece, all without sacrificing the suspension of disbelief. After a few early tests creating the animated effects in Maya, it was obvious that this was going to work really well.

Is it important to give your artists creative freedom to create work like this? Does it reflect on the day-to-day commercial work?

There's a lot of truth in the old saying that creativity is like a muscle that has to be flexed and exercised regularly. Doing your own personal project is always a fantastic learning experience and a way to push one's own ability and confidence further. We've had a huge amount of interest in the project from all over the world, and we're very excited about how it's already opening up new possibilities to collaborate with other creative people and businesses.

How did the sound-design get put together? Was it an important component to tying the elements of the film?

We got in touch with our friends at Mcasso for their expertise in sound design. As always, sound plays a very important part in bringing CG to life, and Tom Martin did a superb job using sound to enhance the character and scale of each of the vehicles.

Are there plans to do any more films?

Due to the phenomenal response we've received for Tiny Worlds, we are considering a new trilogy of shorts… stay tuned.

What's up next for you guys?

Right at the moment we're concentrating on building on the strengths of our team and pushing ourselves to deliver the best creative service to our clients as we can. We're always looking for new ways to challenge ourselves, and we'll hopefully be able to show some of our most recent work on our brand new websit