How Rushes Cleaned Up the Streets of Soho with Tiny Worlds

It’s the little things that matter. The team at post production house Rushes may have been busy working on an epic website overhaul, but that didn’t stop them pausing to do their bit to make the streets of London a better place to be.  The "Tiny Worlds" trilogy of short films shows a humorous take on what might happen to the litter and rubbish on London's streets when we're not looking.

Whether scooping up cigarette butts or trying to unstick globs of gum, Tiny World shows miniature construction vehicles tidying up the Soho streets.

Tiny Worlds // Submarine from Rushes on Vimeo.

The Rushes team explains:

“The project was started at the beginning of this year as the result of a team creative brainstorming session. A number of ideas were suggested, but Tiny Worlds won through and captured the imagination and enthusiasm of everyone involved. Once the concept was decided, the ideas were developed further to come up with the three scenarios, and the vehicle design was able to get started.

Tiny Worlds // Bulldozer from Rushes on Vimeo.

“A key creative decision we made early on, was how to approach the various effects (smoke, water splashes, explosions, etc.) when dealing with a world being shown at such a small scale. We quickly realised that if we had decided to create the effects in a photo-realistic manner, then things like the torpedo impact would end up looking more like a chinese-firecracker, rather than the dramatic explosion that we wanted to show. At this point, we decided to use 2D hand animated elements to represent the effects instead. This had the immediate benefit of releasing us from the photo-real constraint and added a stylised feel to the piece, all without sacrificing the suspension of disbelief. After a few early tests creating the animated effects in Maya, it was obvious that this was going to work really well.

“The other tricky challenge that had to be solved was how to get the submarine to interact with the live action footage of the puddle. After exploring a few possible solutions, we decided to build the puddle in 3D and carefully recreate the reflections, as seen in the original footage. A ripple simulation was generated in Houdini based on the submarine animation, and everything was carefully blended together in Nuke to make sure that we could keep the reflections of the people as they walked by.

Tiny Worlds // Logging Truck from Rushes on Vimeo.

“Finally, we got in touch with our friends at Mcasso for their expertise in sound design. As always, sound plays a very important part in bringing CG to life, and Tom Martin did a superb job using sound to enhance the character and scale of each of the vehicles.”

Check out the new site here.

Credits ::

Executive Producer:  Norra Abdul Rahim

Producer:  Caroline Laing

Head of CG:  Andy Nicholas

Lead CG:  Andy Hargreaves

Director: Chris Hutchison 

CG Artists:  Chris Hutchison, Craig Travis, David Drese, Liam Hoflay, Andrea Scibetta, Nimesh Patel

Nuke:  Noel Harmes

Flame:  Martin Goodwin

Sound Design:  Tom Martin @ Mcasso

Production Assistant:  Alexina Davidson