Multimedia
Blogs
Forum
Affordable HD
Whitepapers
Newsletters
Events
Advertisers
DCP Directory
MillimeterThe Football King
Apr 1, 2006 12:00 PM, By Michael Goldman
For a recent spot, Burger King's mascot, the King, replaces former 49ers quarterback Steve Young in breaking an open-field run, while interacting with real players from the vintage NFL footage. That spot posed extreme tracking challenges, according to director/visual effects supervisor Leslie Ekker of Digital Domain (DD).
Running the archival footage through DD's proprietary tracking software yielded data on lens, lens height, focal distance, angles, and camera travel distance information. “That let us figure out how to shoot the King [at Long Beach Memorial Stadium],” Ekker says. “But even then, in some cases, camera placement and move duplication was impossible because some of the archival footage was shot from the top of a professional football stadium, hundreds of feet away.”
Ekker's team handled those situations through simulation of a long-range pan-tilt move. They achieved the effect in-camera by simultaneously dollying a camera crane chassis and panning a crane arm while panning and tilting the camera head. During the shoot, Ekker also employed a variety of other tricks to simulate Young's motions in the vintage footage. At one point, for instance, the quarterback bumps into several linemen.
“I designed a special bluescreen pad the shape of the cluster of linemen in the footage — a thickly padded quarter cylinder covered with bluescreen material on skids,” Ekker explains. “We had our actor lean into the pad and roll off it, mimicking Young's motion.”
