Super Bowl Sunday, 1998. The highlight of every Super Bowl is, of course, the new commercials. This year is no different. Some of the better ads (in my opinion, which, by the way, is always correct) of the day were for Pepsi. The best of their barrage was one taking place high above the earth.
A Spitfire is taking off from a sky-surfing training facility. This is to be another routine flight with the everyday thrills of sky-surfing. As the plane takes off, there are unusually bumpy conditions, however, being very experienced, the pilot continues. Upon reaching sufficient altitude, the plane levels off when the pilot suddenly notices a UFO.
He performs his famous "stop, flip, and roll" maneuver, but the UFO is just too quick. As a red beam emerges from the alien aircraft, the pilot realizes he must get out ASAP. As he bails from the plane, it blows up in flames, almost taking him with it. Guess who…..It’s Silver Surfer (echo, echo, echo). Equipped only with his sky-board, our hero must find a way to survive this great predicament.
As the plane blows up, the front of the UFO opens and out appears what seems to be a duck, yes a duck! The duck leisurely flies out of the aircraft and gets close to our hero (who is currently sky-surfing to safety) with no blatant intentions of harm.
The duck then does the unthinkable, he challenges the sky-surfer with a full flip. Our sky-surfer meets the challenge, but as he does, the duck offers yet a greater challenge. Free falling is one thing, free falling in a spiral is, well, impressive. Our hero pulls himself into position and proceeds to meet the ducks challenge.
The duck, once out of it's spiral, nonchalantly flies off into the mountains. Meanwhile, our hero is attempting to pull out of his impressive retort to the alien duck when his board suddenly rips away from him. What to do, the Silver Surfer never loses his board. A parachute, don’t even joke. He knew it, he was toast. Don’t worry he’s not dead, he’s just "resting."
The End.
Our hero is very carefully modeled via blobby modeling. His arms and legs are split into two parts and his torso and head are separate entities. This allows for great control of body movement and characterization.
These members of the scene are parametrically constructed, allowing for the smooth curves and fluid features. Also, a time based texture map is used to detail the evil UFO.
The mountains are constructed by calculating a 2D field of altitudes. The ocean is a beautiful .gif file that is imported. The hangar is built from an list of enumerated vertices as is the runway. Finally the mountains are colored based on their altitude.
The explosion that consumed the Spitfire was modeled using density fields. Random components were added to the density field to generate the explosive nature of the volume.
The motion of the plane, boarder and duck follow simple paths traced out to lead them to particular target sites. The camera follows these paths and gives us different angles on the events that are occurring.
Download the mpeg file:
silver_vs_pepsi.mpg -- 2939 kilobytesCopyright 1998.
Rishi Khanna & David Krasnopolsky