Directed by Fredrik Bond, the new Guinness commercial features a truck full of magnetic Guinness attracting fridges from surrounding homes. The agency was Irish International BBDO with Sonny London in charge of the production. Fridge Magnet is the first MPC project to take advantage of the international network now available to MPC with 80% of the VFX for the job being completed in the newly opened MPC studio in LA, the remaining 20% of VFX pre-prod work and the master grade were carried out using the high bandwidth network between MPC locations in LA and London.

The ad consists of 11 major CG shots, on which the LA team started working the day after their opening, when the plates for 3D tracking and roto started to arrive. These were seamlessly integrated into the extended MPC system in LA. Prior to this, fridges had been ‘cast’ and prep work in terms of building models during shooting and editing had been carried out in London. Once the cut was locked, the team in LA began lighting and finalising the animation. The main challenge was tracking the very fast whip pans and zooms, which were used to create the crowd, action feel. The networked locations allowed a consistently clear, open and transparent approval process between the Director in LA with the team and the Agency based in London.

Over 700 fridges were animated for the end shot. The initial approach was to hand animate each nuance of each fridge impacting the truck, however, during production; a dynamic solution was developed to speed this up. This new strategy involved running dynamic simulations in RealFlow and writing custom scripts to transfer this animation to a host of different fridge models back in Maya, where all the shots were created. Photoshop was used for texturing and tracking was done with Boujou and PFTrack.

The 2D team removed wires that were suspending the real fridges. Atmospheric smoke was added and close up head replacement was done. Crowds were duplicated and the city underwent clean up. The main challenge was compositing in the 3D elements to match marks on the ground, smoke, debris and other atmospheric elements.

The master grade was added in London by Director of Telecine, Jean-Clement Soret.

‘Fridge Magnets,’ is the first example of MPC using their bases in LA and London to make use of their pipeline of global resources to get the job done and enabling the team to work 24/7 giving a timely, creative and convenient workflow for Clients. The spot is on air from October 9th in Ireland.