Pixeldust Studios Captures the Wild of ‘Untamed Americas’
June 5, 2012 by Screenmag
Pixeldust Studios, an Emmy Award-winning digital animation and visual design company with studios in the Metro D.C. area and New York City, has produced original animations for National Geographic Channel’s upcoming mini-series event Untamed Americas. The show premieres June 10-11 on the National Geographic Channel, Nat Geo WILD and Nat Geo MUNDO.
Pixeldust Studios produced highly detailed animations depicting the geography and topography of the North and South American continents, as seen by the viewer from above.
Based on detailed satellite imagery and extensive research of these continents, the work was designed to embellish the above-the-Earth photography shot by the show’s producers.
Ashley Hoppin, Executive Producer of Untamed Americas for National Geographic Channels, said, ”Pixeldust’s stylistic aerials are both real and other-worldly. They make the viewer feel like he/she is flying up, down, and above the Americas, like Superman.”
“The challenge for us on this massive project was how to best recreate the vast terrain of North and South America using reference materials from satellite data and maps while keeping it manageable in a 3d animation software,” states Ricardo Andrade, Founder/Executive Creative Director of Pixeldust Studios. “We wished to present a photorealistic look to the terrain on the Earth but didn’t want to create the look of traditional maps,” comments Andrade. “Instead, we spent a good deal of time ensuring that the true colors, and the densities of the colors and the terrain, ranging from clouds to snow capped mountaintops to ground landscape to oceans, would match the video plates that were shot. Our CGI work had to blend in seamlessly with the actual video footage that the producers brought to us.”
“We used E-On’s Vue 10 software, which offered us billions of polygons, to depict the various elevations of the Earth’s terrain featured in this show,” adds Andrade. “We also incorporated Autodesk’s Maya 2013 software to create the camera moves as a viewer POV ‘fly-over,’ so there would be seamless transitions from the actual video plate projections, to our CGI terrain, and then back to the outgoing video plates.”