A couple weeks ago I shot a video profile with one of our 3ds Max/Flame clients, Sway. These guys have been doing a lot of great work. In fact they were on cloud 9 when I arrived as they had won the Outstanding Visual Effects in a Music Video award at the VES awards only a couple days earlier. The video was U2 and Green Days' "The Saints are Coming" If you haven't seen it this video is a very political look at what the the Katrina aftermath would have been like if Iraq war level resources has been applied to the disaster. This required a huge amount of 3d integration with live video from real news casts. This is hard enough but remember they are integrating this footage into things like VHS copies of bad CNN footage. I'm sure many of you can imagine or have complained about back plates being shot with no consideration for the CG that happens afterwards. This is the poster child for bad backplates. The work was beautifully done and you can see a you tube version of it here although the quality doesn't do it justice.

As if working on a politically charged piece like this wasn't enough Sway also was the vfx house that did the CG work for the latest run of GM commercials. There was enough controversy around these commercials to make GM go back to Sway to ask for alternate cuts. Apparently Robot arm suicide is not appropriate even in a dream.

We also talked a lot about one of Sways specialties which is cg cars. Sway has written a driving simulator that can be run real time with steering wheel and all that allows them to simulate correctly any vehicle. the can enter mass, center of gravity, friction of the tires, how much the tires deform, amount of travel and stiffness of the shocks and on and on. All of this Data funnels onto the car rig in 3ds max and makes for incredibly real car motion. Sway is definitely a studio to watch