A fleet of stealth planes drops Verizon's new Droid phone to an unsuspecting America.

In this spot a fleet of sleek stealth aircraft drop Verizon's new Droid phone across America, a futuristic almost alien device that seems to have an intelligence of it's own. The spot draws on science fiction motifs as much as suspenseful Hitchcock-esque storytelling ones. Directed by MJZ's Rupert Sanders, I supervised the extensive visual effects which included a fully CGI sequence of stealth planes dropping their high-tech packages from high altitude, multiple pod trails and impact explosions, and sky replacements throughout. We shot over four days in the mountains and desert around Palmdale, CA in blistering heat and dust storms. We started the process early on working in close collaboration with Rupert's production design team to design the aesthetic of the plane and droid 'pods'. Previsualization was built as a combination of animated CGI and footage taken from multiple sources. The editorial goal was always to build a montage that felt like it was cut from a large selection of dailies as opposed to a meticulous choreographed and correspondingly unnatural sequence. Whenever we felt that it was feeling too fluid, composition or shot selection was adjusted to give it a more naturalistic energy. All the live action explosions, and trails were composited in Flame. CGI planes and terrain were created in wide array of packages (Maya, Terragen, Renderman, BodyPaint, etc.) and composited in Nuke using multiple floating-point, linear light passes. The plane was built from the ground up combining diffuse, specular, reflection, fresnel, and ambient occlusion passes and additional lighting tweaks and motion blur were added using normal passes and motion vector passes. All of this was packaged into a custom interface that controlled the comp process and guaranteed a consistent look from shot to shot. Additional custom UI tools were created in Nuke to create the lens flare and lighting effects that incorporate realistic camera motion, reflections, and light leaks.