Screen Magazine: Vol. 28, Issue 14

Screen Magazine - Index

Screen Magazine - Screen Magazine: Vol. 28, Issue 14 - Index

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This is something you can imagine just
about every VFX company is dying
to hear…“We want you to create a
simulation of a physically accurate,
precisely choreographed, extremely toxic
substance.”
Okay, so that’s not a direct quote, but that
was Farmington Hills, Mich.-based With A
Twist Studio’s assignment for a new spot for
Amp’d Mobile’s customized Motorola Moto
Q phone – make liquid mercury, make it real,
but make it dance.
Using the software Real Flow, With A
Twist’s Frank Synowicz was able to create
simulations of the way liquid mercury would
roll across different surfaces by inputting
specific parameters. He was then able to
“trick” nature by deftly choreographing the
movements to allow images of available Amp’d
Mobile entertainment to be placed on top of
the metal.
This might seem too difficult a task if
some of the simulations didn’t take two days
or more to compute. “We ran a massive
amount of simulations to get the right look
and performance,” says VFX supervisor David
Burton. “We put our whole pipeline to the test.
Every resource was dedicated to this project.”
And, according to CG supervisor Brandon
Bartlett, those resources included not only the
first thing that pops into most people’s minds
when they think of liquid mercury moving
around – “Terminator 2” – but also included
research on YouTube. And although a search
for “liquid mercury” gets significantly more hits
for the band Queen, it does yield a few decent
videos of the metal in action.
“Mercury is a pretty volatile substance,”
says Bartlett, “and we didn’t want to expose
ourselves to it here, so we looked up quite
a bit of reference on YouTube to see how it
moved.”
Not only was With A Twist responsible
for creating mercury to exact specifications,
it also needed to create asphalt and model
a phone as well. Using the same style of
DIY ingenuity that provided the Internet
reference for mercury, the asphalt in the
spot was modeled after With A Twist’s own
parking lot. Bartlett insists the lot isn’t quite
as bad as it looks in the commercial.
And whether that’s true or not, With A
Twist was successful in making liquid metal
move in a way that not only looks real,
but also performs with a lot more spark
and personality than most other liquid
mercury. We’re not going to name names,
but take that T2.
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