In this spot for Com Hem once again plays with a viral Youtube clip that some of you may have seen – the OMG Cat . A clip where a cute kitten drops it’s jaw to the floor, in total “surprise”.
Mats Lindberg from Traktor approached Stopp’s VFX Team, asking us to help him copy the style of the OMG Cat clip as closely as possible. Having worked with Mats on earlier projects we knew that he is really in to the details, so when he means close, he means it.
Everything from the background, film quality, body movement and eyes, fur pattern, to the jaw dropping must be as close a match to the original as possible. As we all know cats are not easily directed so to solve the task a fair amount of digital effects and thorough planning was needed.
Stopp was there from the beginning. With experience from earlier projects (Tele2 Beatbox), we knew we could solve the jaw with a head/jaw replace. For that the 3D department had to model the cat’s head and track the movement.
A lot of moving and stills reference photography of the cat was taken on set, as well as shooting HDR lighting stills and collecting on-set data etc.
With this in the bag we knew we could solve the task. Of course there was a lot left to do. The filmed performance of the new cat was not matching the original. It was looking in the wrong direction, it’s eyes were too small, the body movement was off, the ears were moving when they shouldn’t and the cat was all white when it should really be striped on the head. And of course it was not dropping it’s jaw at all. These were all things that needed to be taken care of.
First the jaw was modelled in 3D, textured and head movements tracked. In the mean time – in online – several things were taken care of with Flame as the main tool. First the cats eyes were enlarged with warping. Sometimes the cat’s eyes were focusing in the wrong direction, this was also fixed by tracking and replacing with new eyes. The cat’s ears were moving all over the place so they were also replaced. In one of the shots the cat had to make a sudden move, a move that wasn’t caught on film. So to replicate this move the whole cat needed to be rotoscoped with fur and all and then warped to match the original OMG Cat motion. The original cat also had gray stripes on it’s head. To fix this a new head texture with stripes were painted and tracked/warped in place.
Later animated mouth-pieces were delivered from 3D and composited on top of the cat’s closed mouth. They were subtly warped and tweaked to deliver the final surprised OMG Cat look. Lastly the HD material was matched in quality and feel to look like hand held consumer video mangled through Youtube compression a couple of times.