Click 3X Cooks up Talking Chickens with Flame

By: Claudia Kienzle



Creative shop Click 3X recently completed two campaigns promoting Burger King’s new “Chicken Fries” for the Spanish and U.S. television markets. In a very tight timeframe, Click 3X had to create multiple versions of the two visual-effects-centric campaigns to meet different length and language requirements.



Called “Friends” and “Outcast,” the two ad campaigns were directed by Matt Lenski, a New York–based independent commercial director working with Miamibased ad agency Crispin Porter + Bogusky, representing Burger King/Spain. But when the original package of PAL-formatted :20s and :10s (20- and 10-second) commercials targeting the Spanish market turned out so well, Crispin Porter + Bogusky put in a rush order for another package :15s and :30s in English and NTSC for the U.S. market.

Mark Szumski and Kevin Quinlan, the visual effects supervisors and Autodesk® Flame® software artists who worked on the campaigns, credit the Flame visual effects compositing system for their ability to meet the creative objectives in the timeframes allotted. At Click 3X, the three Flame suites are supported by the Autodesk® Wire® high-speed data transfer system and the Autodesk® Burn™ application, which relegates time-consuming rendering to a background procedure. Also, Click 3X has a CG department that uses industry-leading Autodesk® Maya® 3D animation software.



“Like much of the work we do here, these two high-profile Burger King campaigns required seamless compositing of 3D CG imagery with live action plates,” says Szumski.

The premise of both “Friends” and “Outcast” is that some chickens are willing to risk the anger and ridicule of other chickens simply because they want to become a chicken fry—Burger King’s new premium item that crosses fried chicken with french fries.



In “Friends,” a teenage rooster rebels against his rooster-Dad as he asserts his desire to become a chicken fry. And in “Outcast,” bully chickens harass a rooster who reveals his innermost desire to become a chicken fry.

“We had to complete all the English versions within one week. It was very laborintensive to make the chickens and roosters appear to be talking in a credible way in both languages,” says Quinlan. “We used a lot of the Flame tools—3D lighting, shading, texturing, projectors, and deformers, as well as 2D compositing of the wattles on the roosters’ necks and manipulating their Flame-modeled 3D beaks to achieve the desired talking effect.”

Szumski and Quinlan started with film plates shot by Lenski of chickens and roosters that were placed on custom-built, highly detailed miniature sets, such as a residential street and a living room. With each chicken’s performance captured separately, the Click 3X effects team—including Szumski, Quinlan, and Flame artist Aaron Vasquez—composited all of the fowl that needed to be in each frame.

From there, they digitally erased the lower portions of each chicken’s beak, including the wattles (the dangling flesh hanging from roosters’ necks), then painstakingly replaced them with CG equivalents constructed in Flame. The beaks were then manipulated in time to the chickens’ dialog as recorded by voice-over actors.



“Creating a realistic talking chicken is fairly complex,” says Szumski. The Click 3X effects team discovered that if you try to animate the beak so it actually matches the phonemes of the dialog, it tends to look wrong, particularly in the Spanish versions where the dialog is spoken quite rapidly. So they developed a technique that uses the major phonemes (mouth positions for the spoken word) as key points and built subtle beak movements around those.

“Having 3D capabilities is what makes Flame so unique and powerful, and that’s where you can give added credibility to the illusions you are creating,” adds Quinlan. “While compositing 2D and 3D elements within the 3D Flame environment, you can position the ‘lights’ and move the ‘cameras’ around any way you want to, as well as change attributes such as shading, glows, and depth of field—within what is essentially a 3D virtual studio within the Flame Action module.”



Concurrent to the work on the Burger King spots, Click 3X was also working on a music video called “Trees,” for chart-topping British group Zero 7, which marked the return of Dr. Octagon; and a promotional video for Rock Steady Crew, the founders of b–boy dance in the 1970s, which will premiere at this year’s Boards Summit.

Since being the first customer to install a Flame system in New York City over a decade ago, Click 3X has continually upgraded its Flame suites. Click 3X’s compositing is currently based upon three Flame (version 9.5.9) workstations, two of which are based on SGI® Octane® 2 and one that is running on an SGI Tezro® platform.

However, the two Octane 2 workstations are being replaced with Linux® workstations primarily for the five-fold speed increase Linux provides. Since the Tezro was purchased only last year, Click 3X will wait until next year to swap it for Linux.



With three Flame systems, one of which is networked to their Maya-based CG department , Click 3X finds that Wire is critical to the efficient transfer of large files between the systems. And Burn enables them to keep on working without interruption while they render the work they’ve just completed—capitalizing on creative momentum.



“Our clients seem surprised and impressed that Burn can do that. They’re expecting a delay and then there isn’t one,” says Szumski. “It’s a huge time-saver to be able to render out in the background and just keep on working.”

Both Szumski and Quinlan agree they could not have completed the visually complex Burger King campaigns with such realism and within the allotted timeframe without Flame, Wire, and Burn, because the toolsets and performance of those applications are unmatched in the industry.



“Flame is the best thing out there. Period,” says Szumski. “We can do anything with a Flame.”