The Devil's Chair is an animated commercial set in the fictional New Zealand town of Port Avon. The unlucky residents are plagued by an evil chair that wreaks havoc in their daily lives.

We built the small town of "Port Avon" in 3D using 3DS Max and Maya. Every item in the town had textures made and shaders built so it fitted into our world. We used Mari to paint textures for the hero items and characters. We had over 18 different characters that needed to be designed, modelled, rigged and animated. We wrote a custom caching pipeline tool that allowed animation to be updated at any time regardless of whether the scenes were in Maya or Max. Vray was the renderer of choice. It gave us the ability to turn all the features on and get a great look without too much post tinkering in the comp stage. Each sequence was assigned to a different lighting lead - this meant that each sequence has a unique feel which helps sell the changes in time in the story. The explosions and smoke were all simulated in FumeFX. Everything was composited and graded in Nuke. We had a nice mixture of visual effects, large scale scenes, indoor sets, small crowds of characters which meant that there were lots of little things to figure out along the way. The sheer amount of detail in every scene, coupled with a tight deadline made it a nice challenging job for the production company.