Here’s how they did it (including a whole bunch of VFX breakdown videos).
The first thing you should do before reading this article is to watch ‘Abduction’, the commercial by directors Dylan Bradshaw and Nate Norell that won the Doritos Crash the Super Bowl Contest earlier this year, leading to the ad being shown to millions during the first quarter of Super Bowl LIX and pocketing the creators a cool $1 million.
Watch the spot below:
The alien almost-abduction spot is super-fun and clever, of course, but what’s also a major achievement with ‘Abduction’ is that its visual effects were pulled off by a team of only three VFX artists in their 20s using Blender and After Effects, learnt largely via internet-based tutorials.
befores & afters spoke to one of those artists—freelancer Ethan Montgomery, who lives in Los Angeles—about his experience working on the Doritos spot.
Here, Montgomery breaks down how he came to work with the spot’s directors, the particular animation and effects work he handled mainly in Blender, and his thoughts about the state of play in this kind of indie VFX right now.
b&a: How did you get involved in this Doritos ad?
Ethan Montgomery: My friends Jace Hardwick and Andrew Baer run the production company that helped produce the commercial. They’ve been doing commercials and shorts and things of that nature for a long time. They’re buds with Nate Norell and Dylan Bradshaw, who directed the spot. A bunch of us all graduated from Biola’s School of Cinema and Media Arts in Southern California. I got a call one day from Jace who oversaw the visual effects of the whole project, and he said, ‘Hey, have you heard about the Doritos Crash the Super Bowl competition…?’.
My first response was, ‘How much does it pay?’ And he said, ‘Well, if it wins, it’ll pay.’ But then as soon as I saw the little iPhone version of it that Nate and Dylan had made, I was like, ‘Okay, I don’t care how much it pays. I want to do this.’ I just thought it was so good and so funny.
b&a: There were only a couple of you in terms of VFX, is that right?
Ethan Montgomery: Yes, Jace Hardwick led the VFX team. And then it was just the three of us: Jace, myself, and Garrison Keeton on it. I helped Jace supervise on set with my priority being the flopping around the room shot, adding in more fog and removing the chair the actor was sitting in while he’s being tugged out the window. Jace did the final shot with the explosion and some other things like making the alien blink. Garrison did the hero shots of the Doritos bag floating.
b&a: For that flopping around shot, what kind of data capture or scanning were you able to do?
Ethan Montgomery: I was able to scan the set using Polycam. I also got three scans of Michael, our actor. I needed one full body without the jacket he had on, and then I needed another one of just his head to get some more face detail. Finally I needed one with the jacket so that I could add the jacket as a cloth sim on top of the initial body scan.
It was really a puzzle to plan, that shot. I knew the physics were going to be really not based in reality and deliberately funny. But it actually starts completely real and it ends completely real, even though in the middle it has to be full CG with him flopping around. All the interaction with the chair and the room was done by creating a full CG room from the scans and then projection mapping to get all that interaction.
b&a: How did you tackle that CG work?
Ethan Montgomery: I took my Polycam scan of Michael into Blender and rigged it with a simple skeleton and prep’d it for animation. Then I lined up my scan of the set with the footage. So now I had 3D Michael and 3D set lined up with the footage. And then I just started animating by hand. Actually, I actually did do a puppet pin version in After Effects using a still to make it flop around the room just to get a sense of the physics and got that approved from Nate and Dylan first.
From there, it was about doing every little thing to help sell the photorealism and the contact with the ground in the room. There’s a hair simulation, too. It’s funny how much work I put into the hair simulation, but it’s so dark, you hardly see it. Still, there’s a whole hair simulation going on, and the jacket is a cloth simulation all done in Blender.
The whole room stays as my CG scan the whole time, while Michael, until he gets yanked up, is real while he’s in the chair. When he is yanked up, it switches to a CG ragdoll, and then as soon as he hits the floor again, it goes back to the real plate of him on a greenscreen mat.
One of my favorite things that I was able to do was, when I was on set, I went around the room and just kicked the boxes that were in the corner. I literally just kicked them with my foot just to make them move, and then I wiggled things around the room. In the comp in After Effects, I then stitched some of those things together for every time he hits the floor, which really, really did a lot for this shot.
b&a: How were you dealing with the beam of light?
Ethan Montgomery: On set, we had one of our grips who would puppeteer the spotlight. So we had great practical reference to match. In Blender I really wanted the interaction to help sell it, so that’s why I did a scan of the set so that I could add all the little different ways the light is reacting against the desk, papers, and other objects in the scene.
b&a: As you were working on the commercial, did it come down to the wire at all in terms of getting it finished?
Ethan Montgomery: There were a few all-nighters. At one point, Nate drove to where I was living at the time, from LA to Orange County, which can be a long drive, to sit on my bedroom floor as I worked so that we could do notes quicker. So, it did get pretty down to the wire, but it was the type of project that I think we were all just really happy to work on. Not just because of the competition as much as the fact that it was really funny and fun to work on. We only had a week to do all of post, by the way.
b&a: Oh wow!
Ethan Montgomery: Maybe a week and a half. But it was a fun week and a half, for sure.
b&a: Once they submitted it, what was it like waiting to hear your progress?
Ethan Montgomery: Well, we first heard we were in the top 25, and then we heard we were in the top three, which was when everyone could vote on their favorite. The two others that we were up against were so good. I was just really happy to be in the top three, but I wasn’t really thinking we were going to win.
And then, I had actually just got married and was on my honeymoon in England, and we were like, ‘Hey, have they announced the winner?’ So my wife looked it up, but in England, you can’t access the Doritos website because that specific website was only a US website. So then we looked on Instagram and we could only just see with our very poor wifi just the top of the Instagram page loaded and it said ‘Winner: Abduction’, but it was still hard to fathom. So then we called home and we’re like, ‘Is this true!?’
b&a: How did you feel?
Ethan Montgomery: I mean, it’s still hard to fathom the amount of people seeing our work. I can’t really process that information. It’s really awesome to win and to have so many people see it, and so many people tell us they love it. I keep telling people we loved making it. We were happy with it whether we won or not, because we made something we really loved and we had a good time making it. And so that’s the main takeaway from this project.
b&a: What have you been up to in VFX since then?
Ethan Montgomery: Our whole team has been really busy since the Doritos ad aired. One cool thing we did recently was some promotion for the film Mickey 17 in collaboration with Twitch. We made a bunch of cut scenes for a Twitch stream that basically were supposed to feel like they were straight out of the movie, which was really fun for us.
It was just a small group of us working on that, but the client’s reaction was, whoa, this is crazy that this small group of guys on a fraction of the budget we normally spend on this type of thing is making something that looks this good. A lot of people are having that reaction.
I think there’s actually a lot of people like us that have just learned VFX from free off-the-shelf software and have just set a high bar for ourselves and are doing things smaller and more nimbly than bigger companies. It’s starting to turn heads and make people say, ‘Hey, what if we do this a different way?’
You can see what Montgomery and the team have been up to recently via their Morph VFX company here.
