The cloning effects of Multiplicity were a definite artistic challenge, requiring a look which was visually interesting but not disturbing. Incidentally, Method has done disturbing cloning - check out one my favorites, the anti-smoking PSA Growth if you've never seen it. I think the visuals speak for themselves and the spot certainly represents innumerable hours and cigarettes smoked by its lead artist, Russell Fell.

My primary contribution to this project came in the form of a custom Maya deformer called the proximity deformer. The basic idea was to deform one piece of geometry to conform to another piece of geometry, with the degree of deformation controlled by how far apart they were. It used some tricks to perform the task more quickly than other techniques, and offered an art-directable falloff parameter for refining the look. While we knew that we wouldn't be able to solve this problem entirely in CG, our goal was to provide elements which would do as much work as possible, and then allow the Flame artists to finesse from there.

The QuickTime above is of an early test of the proximity deformer applied to human models. My apologies for the walk-cycle, which I find totally unsettling.

These images depict the sorts of elements we generated for the compositors. The red/blue image served as a mask to separate the two bodies. The lower left is an ambient occlusion render, and the lower right is the camera mapped photography. Working under the leadership of Cedric Nicolas, the Flame artists used these elements to create the final images you see in the spot.