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MillimeterWhoomp, There It Is!
Apr 1, 1997 12:00 PM, Jennifer Vacchio
Converse's new sneaker walks onto the scene in a :30 by Houston Herstek Favat, Boston. The commercial is set in a factory run by biomechanical miniature humanoids which transform the 1950s-style sneakers into present-day shoes. "We wanted the set to be cryptic-looking, dark, and scary, but we didn't want to use actual humans. If we had, the factory would have looked more like a sweat shop, and that is a touchy subject," says Fred Stuhr, director, U Ground, Los Angeles.
Video images of basketball stars are also used by the humanoids to assist in the footwear's transformation. An image of Dennis Rodman appears on a video screen and is sucked through a grimy factory pipe. "The footage that appears on the monitor was prebuilt in Discreet Logic's Flame and treated so that it gave the appearance that a vaccuum [cleaner] was off to the right of the monitor," says James Bygrave, Henry operator at The Finish Line, Santa Monica.
Fred Stuhr and producer Steve Straghan, U Ground, shot footage of the pipe lit only with a blue light. "The texture from the outside of the tube was being silhouetted so that when we applied the image it would look like it was on the inside of the tube," says Bygrave. Bygrave used Quantel's Henry Max software, motion blur, and hand animation to give motion to the image as it moved through the pipe.
A second version of the commercial, starring Golden State Warriors hoopster Latrell Spreewell, was done entirely in postproduction due to time constraints. A matte of the Rodman image was tracked in Henry in order to remove the image from the TV monitor. A dirt track was also created so that the new image would appear to be surrounded in grime. The Spreewell image was composited and color-corrected into the scene using Discreet Logic's Flame. "Most of the postproduction was done in Henry because I feel it is extremely flexible and is very quick for doing clean-ups and editing," says Bygrave. "For this kind of spot there is no intense picture manipulation or clever distortions so the speed of the Henry was fast enough. We were able to put together a shot with all of the effects in a short period of time," he says.
