It’s one thing to get trained cats or dogs to act on cue. It’s another thing to get a hummingbird to perform. Just ask Daniel Barber. Throughout his career, the director, who is represented stateside by Striper Films, New York, and in the U.K. by Rose Hackney Barber, London, has worked with almost every animal you could think of—lions, tigers, giraffes, elephants, monkeys, horses, cows, chickens, and dogs. The list goes on. But he found working with hummingbirds during a shoot for the Infiniti’s "Hummingbird," out of TBWA/ Chiat/Day, Los Angeles, incredibly tough.
"It was a nightmare, actually," Barber recalled with a laugh during an interview with SHOOT. "I don’t think it is actually possible to train a hummingbird at all. They’re tiny little wild creatures, and they’re very nervy. We had two hummingbirds there [at the shoot], and really what we did was we lined up the camera and we all prayed to our various gods.
While shooting the hummingbirds was a challenge, the end result is a beautiful spot that seamlessly integrates images of a hummingbird with Infiniti’s I35. As "Hummingbird" opens, we see a hummingbird—wings flapping furiously—feasting on the nectar of a flower. The bird’s wings freeze as an Infiniti I35, driving on a winding road in the background, comes into view. The camera pans to follow the car. We momentarily step inside the vehicle. A voiceover intones: "The new 250 horsepower Infiniti I35. Don’t blink. More power. More grace. More I. The new Infiniti I35." The camera once again pans to a hummingbird—presumably the same bird, once again enjoying the nectar. The shot implies that the I35 can drive as fast as a hummingbird can fly.
The birds certainly capture the eye of the viewer. According to TBWA/Chiat/Day executive creative director Rob Schwartz, the hummingbird was meant to stand out, to make the spot noticeable and also to demonstrate the power of the Infiniti I35.
Funnily enough, the client wasn’t necessarily thrilled about the idea of using the hummingbird when the agency creatives originally pitched the concept. "Going in, they said, ‘Well, that’s great. But can we lose the bird?’ " Schwartz said. When they saw the finished spot, the client appreciated the importance of the bird. "They found the bird added a new dimension to the marketing of the car, where they actually got to see more of the car’s power and grace because of the bird. They were really thrilled to have that bird do a little selling for them."
Of course, finding hummingbirds—few are in captivity—wasn’t easy. Actually, according to Striper Films executive producer Pete Christy, "There was this temptation to a) go with stock footage, or b) to even make a hummingbird in CG—both of which we rejected. Stock footage didn’t give us as much control. It didn’t allow us to slow the wings down as much as we wanted to," he explained. "And we talked to a lot of people about doing a three-dimensional hummingbird in the computer and they gave us answers like, ‘Yeah, sure we can do it. But you know there will be that certain I don’t know what that will let you know that it’s not a real bird.’ "
Ultimately, they decided to go with real birds. Two—provided by Benay’s Birds & Animals, Los Angeles—were shot on stage in front of a bluescreen at Raleigh Studios, Hollywood. Barber and his crew only had two hours to shoot the birds. Essentially, they rigged a faux flower with a line of nectar, which attracted the hummingbird. A Photosonics camera, shooting at 1,250 frames per second, was used to capture the action.
"The film goes through the camera in about seven seconds. It’s very, very fast, and it makes this terrible screeching sound," Barber said. Realizing this might be an issue for the birds, their wrangler actually played them a tape recording of the sound of the camera before the shoot, so they’d get used to the noise, and not be scared by it. "It is very loud," Barber noted. "It would freak most people out."
After shooting the birds, Barber and his crew went to Spokane, Wash., where they shot footage of the Infiniti I35 on a road surrounded by lush greenery. "This part of the shoot was a bit more straightforward but for the fact that you had a car going around a bend at close to one-hundred miles per hour, and you had to pan the camera very, very quickly, and we were shooting [using an Arri 435] at one-hundred fifty frames per second," Barber said. "To get it absolutely correct with the car in exactly the right position took some time. I think we did thirty-five different goes to get two takes which we thought were perfect."
Once all of the elements were shot, they were sent to The Mill, London, where Flame artist Jason Watts worked on the special effects. "The hardest part of the job from my point of view was lifting the bird off of that blue background and making it look like it was on the green background of the car shot," said Watts, who also had to replicate a camera move to make it appear as though the camera had panned from one bird to another. The second bird we see is a flipped image of the first.
Watts spent nearly two weeks working on the spot, but his work is actually invisible. That was the goal, according to Barber. "The idea was to make it look real, non effectsy," he noted. "A lot of care and attention went into the production of an image which is ultimately quite simple and doesn’t look like very much has been done to it at all."
