Hawthorne Debuts Tonight!

As TNT orders up another drama centering on a strong female lead, Green Grass Studios in conjunction with The Outfit, offers up another successful delivery of state of the art visual effects that are guaranteed to contribute to the shows anticipated success. Hawthorne, debuting tonight at 8pm central TNT, chronicles the life of a single mother and the Chief Nursing Officer at Richmond Trinity Hospital in North Carolina. Created by emmy-winning writer-producer John Masius, Christina Hawthorne (played by Jada Pinkett Smith) gives tribute to those that make caretaking their life's work.

This project has been a perfect fit for our studio because it has required the development of photo realistic computer generated imagery to be tracked into each scene. The first episode had our team busy developing and inserting a prosthetic limb for a main character into three shots. We are excited to be a part of the Hawthorne production process and we are looking forward to future episodes.

GGS gets muddy with Ford

Recently we developed a series of Ford spots with our friends over at 3008. The series of six commercials focused on the truck and suv vehicles and aired during truck month (apparently a holiday in Texas). The client request was to see a life like stampede of trucks in context to the cool graphical style of the spot. Our team worked hand in hand with the editors to execute the presentation. Our crew not only developed fully functional CG trucks and suvs but we also created all the dynamic dust, dirt and mud effects. These effects were developed with a combination of particle and fluid simulation. The entire package of spots were produced in a six week squeeze. Provided below is one of the final spots that aired and a CG mud test that we developed while we were producing the spots.

McDonalds Anyone?

About a month ago we were approached by our good friends at 3008 to help with a national commercial spot scheduled to air May 16th. The story was that the agency (Moroch) was looking for a visual effects team that can conceptualize and execute a series of complicated particle effects on a tight deadline. So with the deadline looming we were excited to step in and provide a helping hand.

After a couple of brief concept meetings, our team set out to develop a series of particle intensive visual FX shots that focused on rebuilding two primary characters from dust. During this process our artists worked with 3008 and Moroch to develop the look and feel of the particles while sculpting computer generated replicas of each actor. Once the look and feel was finalized we used the computer generated actors to develop multiple composite passes of the particles. These individual passes defined events for the particles such as a simulated vortex with wispy streams, color changes from the soft yellow/white dust to the actors colors, and an added sparkle effect. After all was set up, we used our 200+ processor in-house rendering farm to accomplish the complex particle calculations and memory intensive rendering tasks. At job completion, the team developed a successful custom production pipeline that not only exceeded the client’s quality expectations but delivered it on time.