You can practically feel the heat blasting from the TV screen when you watch DirecTV’s “Hot House.”
We first see a man lying in bed and calmly watching his bedroom fill with flames. It turns out what he’s viewing is a dramatic film sequence on DirecTV that later has a fireman falling through the floor and rescuing a little boy. Indeed the original man’s viewing experience is so intense that it looks and feels as though the scenes are literally playing out within the walls of his home as he moves from room to room.
Created by Grey New York and directed by Noam Murro of Biscuit Filmworks, L.A., with visual effects by MPC LA, the spectacularly cinematic “Hot House” is part of a series of spots that promote DirecTV’s multi-room viewing feature by depicting people watching films, pressing pause to freeze the action, then moving to other TV-equipped rooms to continue the flicks.
Previous impressive spots have shown robots engaged in battle (“Robots” was directed by Rupert Sanders of MJZ) and lovers romping about (Fredrik Bond, also of MJZ, directed “Love Match). “We’re trying not to do commercials that look and feel like commercials,” Grey executive creative director Todd Tilford said. “We’re trying to do things that reflect the DirecTV product, to give people a taste of that immersive experience they get while watching DirecTV.”
Upping the ante “Hot House,” with fire licking every frame, ups the ante from a production and VFX standpoint, and the spot marked Murro’s first time working on the campaign. He said his biggest challenge was “jumping into an already successful campaign and taking it to the next level.”
MPC had worked on the previous two spots, so the VFX team was well versed in the art and science of creating the stunning frozen moments the campaign is known for. “We wanted to give Noam as much freedom as possible from the technical aspects so he could focus on the story,” MPC VFX supervisor/Flame lead Franck Lambertz said.
Murro and DP Simon Duggan shot everything in-camera, working with Full Scale Effects of North Hollywood, Calif., on the shoot. A two-story house was actually built on a soundstage and engulfed in flames. “We had a great production designer and practical effects team who carefully planned out each set-up, with safety as the number one priority,” Murro said.
MPC was there to monitor the shoot, validating each plate’s compatibility with the visual effects requirements. “We have to give Biscuit a lot of credit because they had a lot of prep time there on the set and that paid off on the days of the shoot,” MPC visual effects supervisor/lead 3D Michael Wynd said. “We knew what we were going to get. There was nothing left to be questioned.”
The only issue that did arise on set had to do with smoke. After a take was done, it could take as long as an hour and a half for the smoke to clear.
After the two-day shoot, Haines Hall of Spot Welders cut the spot, and MPC set out to match their computer-generated effects, including copious amounts of flame created in Maya Fluids, to the live-action performance. “One of the things we struggled with was just what the fire should look like,” Wynd said, “and it wasn’t until we went through plate by plate that we became aware of the fact that there are so many different types of fire in one shot depending on what’s burning.”
There was also the issue of how much fire there should be. “We had to make sure the fire didn’t overshadow the fireman,” Wynd said. MPC added other touches, ranging from a mix of 2D and 3D smoke to floating insulation. The fireman’s head was tracked in every shot, and reflections of the fire were added to his eyes.
In-camera advantage Lambertz said it was quite helpful for the effects team that Murro had shot the spot in-camera. “That meant there was no time lost describing what the scene should look like because it was shot in-camera. Everybody said, ‘Okay, a room full of fire should look like this’ because we really did it,” Lambertz said. “So our job was to make sure that we took the best of all the shots and applied the best of everything everywhere.”
“If we had generated all of the flame, it would have been a nightmare,” Wynd agreed, “because there would have been endless discussions about what the flames should look like.”
Tilford cited Murro for bringing humanity to “Hot House.” “When all is said and done, the effects are amazing, but you’ve got to have that human connection, both the viewer connected to the commercial he’s watching and the film he’s watching within the commercial with the fireman and the young boy. You want that to be honest and real,” Tilford said, “and I thought Noam did an amazing job of bringing that humanity to it.”
“Hot House” is heightened by a cinematic score composed by Robert Miller of stimmüng and sound effects from Kim Christensen of Noises Digital, topping this week’s SHOOT Top Ten Tracks Chart. (See www.shootonline.com or the 6/17 SHOOT>e.dition for the backstory on the music and sound design.)