Benjamin tells us a little about the story behind his award winning work on the Alien Vs Predator series of stills created for Sky Digital New Zealand.

I say old boy, I think that's check mate...

Ben Parry:

3D cluster where I freelance, was contacted by DDB New Zealand to create these posters for their client Sky Digital New Zealand.The posters were created to advertise Alien Vs Predator: Requiem airing on the Sky Digital television network in February 2009.

The jobs budget was extremely small. We call this sort of job a Charity job. Where the advertising agency has control with little input by the client in return for little money. The budget was equivalent to just over half a weeks pay for the 4 weeks of work we did. The two creatures were made with two different processes. Alien was made by Andre McGrail, by firstly creating a mid res model in Modo and then painting the textures in Photoshop after the model was UV’d, to be applied later on when surfacing the character.

Smoking kills (Should you tell him or should I?)

The start of Predator was the same. I created a mid res model of Predator then took the mesh into ZBrush. There I tried my hand with ZBrush for the first time, sculpting the high res details and painting the colour textures. I exported the high res as a displacement map. We then built the props in the scenes so that the the characters could interact with them and receive shadows. The characters were posed and David Partridge then proceeded with the surfacing, lighting and rendering. After the render was complete, Andy Salisbury the touched up the render in Photoshop to enhance the image.

Attention to detail is one of the most striking features of the work

The images won lots of awards. Here are some to name but a few.

• 2 CG Choice awards.
• Master award in whimsical in the 2010 Expose 8 (soon to be released)
• 2009 Caxton Award winners in the Ad categories; Media, Entertainment, Telco and IT; Best Campaign; Best Art Direction; Best Photography.
• Bestadsontv.com best ad in February 2009,
• Adsoftheworld.com best craft in March 2009.