BEATS BY DRE
'The Pills'
Introducing the Beats Pills by Dr. Dre, voiced by Eminem, Chris Rock, Tichina Arnold and Corey Holcomb. We worked directly with Beats and R/GA to create this spot for the MTV Video Music Awards ceremony in less than three weeks, using the Pill, framestore artists designed the first Beats commercial and turned it into six unique characters.
The ads were followed by real time CG exploits when the Pill characters were animated live, thanks to Framestore’s groundbreaking game engine technology. By recreating the subversive Pills as real time CG characters, they were able to use Twitter and YouTube to instantly quip about red carpet outfits and give us their own irreverent commentary on standout stage moments.
The brief here was to bring the Pill character to life with a flexible rig that was able to morph easily between the characters and work in real-time in a games engine. The Framestore Senior Rigger at the time Amar Chundavadra rigged the body, with a great IK/FK limb system and worked on the bodies needed flexibility. I assisted Amar with the facial setup speaker control.
The brows were given a lot of stretchy deformation control with eyelashes being riveted to the mesh using follicles. The Pills mouth was given various controls to deform and skew its shape, as the animators required for when the Pill was speaking. The eye setup was not too difficult as the eyes were perfectly round and the lids were given controllers that the animators had 100% control over.
The real-time avatar that was passed to the game's engine team was completely joint based and ran at well over 80 frames per second on a standard quad core machine at the time.
From what we heard back from the agency, they were incredibly happy with the work that was done and shown to them and didn't require any changes from us.
• Client: Beats by Dre
• Agency: RGA
• Director: Chris Waitt/Henry Trotter
• Animation / Post Production Framestore
