Milo Goes Fishing

Oscar winning visual effects facility The Mill has just completed a series of three spots for Goldfish credit cards including the thirty-second commercial "High Street" directed by Phil Taylor at Sneezing Tree Films for TBWA.

In "High Street" a woman walks into a store via the shop front where she appears to be swimming in a tank full of fish. All the fish were created by The Mill's 3D team using Softimage and Mental Ray. CG fish rather than real fish allowed the director more control over movement and choreography. A model of the fish was designed using reference material, and then revised and given a high-resolution texture by The Mill's Dusan Strugar. He then set about constructing 20 generic moves for the fish, from which a further 200 variations were developed. Various layers were composited, paying particular attention to the composition of depth.

For "High Street", The Mill's Shepperton-based Motion Control team took the Milo rig on location to the Brunswick Centre in London. A move was programmed into the Milo, to create a pull back shot that begins inside the shop window, panning out to reveal the shop front and street scene. Multiple passes of pedestrians were filmed to create reflections and various time-lapse elements that were then composited by Phil Crowe in Flame.

Positional information from the live action cameras was recorded, to enable subsequent matching of perspectives for a model shoot of a fish tank, needed to complete the pull back shot.

Adam Howarth, Mill Models, built a glass tank as a scaled down version of the shop window, with the capacity to hold 2.5 tons of water. The glass tank model was then shot on The Mill Motion Control W Stage where the team scaled, matched and checked the motion control move to the locked off live action shots of the shop front. Using the Milo system, the live action camera plates were then lined up to match the model fish tank.

The various plates of the woman, shop front, reflections passes of the pedestrians and tank, as well as the 3D fish were composited by Flame artist Phil Crowe.

The final shots can be seen below.