You’ve heard the term “deuces are wild.” Well, replace the deuces with apples in this PSA for City Harvest Food Rescue Organization, a longstanding charity dedicated to feeding New York City’s hungry with excess food collected from restaurants, grocers, corporate cafeterias, manufacturers and farms. The food is then delivered free of charge to nearly 600 community food programs using a fleet of trucks and bikes as well as volunteers on foot. Each week, City Harvest helps over 260,000 hungry New Yorkers find their next meal.
Apples are evident in the PSA’s storyline as well as a key production means (as in an Apple iPhone). The spot opens on a young woman looking at a train route map posted on a pillar at a NYC subway platform. She gets her geographic bearings as she tells her off-screen companion–who’s filming her–that they’re headed to Times Square. The train arrives completely full–but not with people. Instead the “passengers” are hundreds of thousands of green apples.
The woman looks on in disbelief. The train doors open and the apples spill out all over the platform. A voiceover from the train conductor relates that each day 70,000 pounds of food are wasted in New York while thousands of residents don’t have enough to eat. He urges us to help City Harvest rescue food for New York’s hungry, followed by the traditional conductor send-off, “Thank you and have a nice day.” On another subway pillar we see the website address, cityharvest.org.
Filmed in one shot on an iPhone, “Apples” was created, produced and finished by The Mill NY for Draftfcb New York. City Harvest asked Draftfcb for a commercial that conveyed a lot of food is wasted in a voluminous way. “Our goal with this year’s City Harvest campaign is to visualize the numbers behind the hunger problem in New York–both the amount of food that goes to waste and the number of residents that go hungry,” explained Keith Loell, executive creative director, Draftfcb. “We’re hoping that the sight of a few hundred thousand apples pouring out of a subway car will get the attention of potential donors.”
The iPhone captured a realistic feel people can relate to, and one that lends to a digital life as a viral film and a cinema vérité-styled commercial. The Apples were created entirely using CGI.
Yann Mabille, The Mill’s joint head of 3D, and co-director of “Apples,” said that the iPhone was singled out by the team for its practical playback feature, and overwhelming popularity and near ubiquitous presence among cell phone users. The spot was filmed in one day, and took three weeks to finish. Although its resulting style is low-fi, finessing that look and feel took technical expertise and innovation behind the scenes.
Angus Kneale, The Mill’s creative director and co-director of the City Harvest PSA, noted that an exact virtual camera move had to be created that matched the physical iPhone camera. “Due to the rolling shutter from the CMOS sensor, the raw footage was slightly distorted,” Kneale explains. “Regular tracking software could not work.”
Armed with this knowledge before the shoot, The Mill created an innovative tracking rig for the iPhone. “It would have been impossible to track the iPhone camera without the rig,” said Vince Baertsoen, lead 3D artist for The Mill. “We had to re-create a motion capture set-up in the station. On set, we looked at places we could put cameras and determined how we could triangulate the rig. We used three Canon 5D Mark II static cameras to record everything in sync simultaneously.”
“The rig was designed to clearly show the iPhone’s exact position and orientation in 3D space,” Kneale added. “The three Canon 5D Mark II cameras captured the iPhone’s movement from three varying perspectives. The rig had multiple LED lights attached to make the ‘tracking points’ clearly visible in the subdued light. The rigging simplified eighty percent of the work, but a lot of fine-tuning was done by hand, sometimes frame by frame.
“Full HDRI’s of the location were captured,” Kneale continued. “A Spheron Camera was used to capture multiple 360-degree scans that provided exact survey data and lighting conditions of the whole subway platform and train. This data was used to accurately construct the virtual environment and used for everything from modeling to texturing and lighting.
“The CGI was composited into the original live action using Flame. It was important to work at the native resolution of the iPhone and match the codec compression artifacts. The apples were carefully integrated into the footage by emulating the dynamic range and white balance of the iPhone ultimately color matching the apples. Subtle details were added such as green color spill, shadows and reflections. The dynamic auto exposure changes of the iPhone also had to be matched. The tracking was given one last tweak in Flame locking the CGI into the live action.”
The resulting “Apples” commercial has a man-on-the-street sensibility. It is also a fine example of the influence of user-generated content in advertising thanks to the iPhone and the star quality of Apples.
The spot debuted yesterday (11/23) on local New York City television thanks to donated airtime from Horizon Media.
The Draftfcb team included chief creative officer Michael Simons, executive creative director Loell, senior copywriter Greg Wikofff, senior art director Todd Eisner, junior art director Brad Muramoto, and senior producer Liz Haberman.
Editors were The Mill’s Kneale, Mabille and Baertsoen.
Disney Pledges $15 million In L.A. Fire Aid As More Celebs Learn They’ve Lost Their Homes
The Pacific Palisades wildfires torched the home of "This Is Us" star Milo Ventimiglia, perhaps most poignantly destroying the father-to-be's newly installed crib.
CBS cameras caught the actor walking through his charred house for the first time, standing in what was once his kitchen and looking at a neighborhood in ruin. "Your heart just breaks."
He and his pregnant wife, Jarah Mariano, evacuated Tuesday with their dog and they watched on security cameras as the flames ripped through the house, destroying everything, including a new crib.
"There's a kind of shock moment where you're going, 'Oh, this is real. This is happening.' What good is it to continue watching?' And then at a certain point we just turned it off, like 'What good is it to continue watching?'"
Firefighters sought to make gains Friday during a respite in the heavy winds that fanned the flames as numerous groups pledged aid to help victims and rebuild, including a $15 million donation pledge from the Walt Disney Co.
More stars learn their homes are gone
While seeing the remains of his home, Ventimiglia was struck by a connection to his "This Is Us" character, Jack Pearson, who died after inhaling smoke in a house fire. "It's not lost on me life imitating art."
Mandy Moore, who played Ventimiglia's wife on "This Is Us," nearly lost her home in the Eaton fire, which scorched large areas of the Altadena neighborhood. She said Thursday that part of her house is standing but is unlivable, and her husband lost his music studio and all his instruments.
Mel Gibson's home is "completely gone," his publicist Alan Nierob confirmed Friday. The Oscar winner revealed the loss of his home earlier Friday while appearing on Joe Rogan's... Read More