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MillimeterPicture Perfect
Oct 1, 2004 12:00 PM, By Michael Goldman
For the HP spot, frozen shots from moving scenes were inserted into white foam core borders held by the actors.
The Hewlett-Packard spot “Picture Book,” directed by Francois Vogel, slickly transitions from shots and scenes using still photographs that come alive and evolve into the next sequence. The illusion is accomplished almost entirely through intense compositing, according to Chris Jones, compositing supervisor on the spot for Zoic Studios, Culver City, Calif. Jones says Zoic used a combination of Discreet's Combustion and Flame to repeatedly layer moving frames into still frames and still frames into moving frames. Jones credits director Vogel for personally figuring out a workable method for building the composites, since Vogel previsualized the entire concept himself in After Effects, creating “an extensive test for us, mapping out all the composites, and giving us good ideas about creating lighting through color correction.”
Filmmakers broke the commercial down into three different compositing scenarios — bordered prints that actors hold up in the spot, borderless prints where actors grab photos out of thin air, and a shot in which an actor captures a woman jumping on a trampoline in thin air inside a still frame.
“The bordered prints were the most straightforward — we had the actors hold white foam core borders, and we inserted frozen shots from moving scenes photographed on-set into those borders,” Jones explains. “For the borderless prints, we froze images from existing environments, and then tracked them to the actor holding an imaginary picture on-set. The trampoline girl was the only element we shot greenscreen, since we weren't using her environment for her particular photo.”
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