Plastered all over certain New York subway cars are enticing placards by Nike, encouraging harassed commuters to recognize the athletes within themselves by tapping into the joy of PLAY. The posters promise that by successfully moving from point A to point B in the shadows, participants will become immortalized as the fair gods or goddesses of their imaginations. An example of this ability to follow the shadows is captured in "Shade Running," a :60 spot wherein a woman races through a city on a hot summer day. Throughout her run, she cleverly strives to find shady cover in numerous places, using the surrounding urban landscape: buildings, a passing truck, a crane-load, an overhead walkway, trees, and a plane flying overhead. Finishing triumphant, she leans against a wall, standing in the checkered shadows, showing off her groovy Nike sneakers. The action is set to a throaty rendition of "You Are My Sunshine."
"Shade Running" was directed by Frank Budgen of Gorgeous Enterprises, London, and bicoastal Anonymous Content, for Wieden+Kennedy (W+K), Portland, Ore. Special effects were completed by a team of artists from Method, Santa Monica. SHOOT caught up with special effects supervisor/artist Simon Scott. Other Method artists included Russell Fell, Scott McNeil, Lauret Briet and James LeBloch.
SHOOT: How soon did you get involved in the production?
SCOTT: Because Frank Budgen was planning to achieve the majority of the spot in-camera, it wasn’t deemed necessary for me to attend the shoot. I felt very comfortable knowing that Frank’s production team had meticulously planned the shoot, by selecting the locations and time of day so that the shadows would fall in a way that told the story. Unfortunately the weather they experienced on location in Toronto was not cooperative and the crew was plagued by overcast days, which meant that we ended up with a mixed bag of shots. Some were completely flat with no shadows at all, some with weak shadows from mixed light, and just a few resulted in good solid shadows.
SHOOT: Can you explain your role in creating the shadows?
SCOTT: The majority of the shots fell into one of three categories. The first of these categories simply required that we trim back the existing shadows to enhance the drama, and in most cases, deepen them to make them appear cooler and more ‘inky.’ The second category required that we add every shadow to every object in the scene, such as the buildings, trees, people and the cars, because there were no shadows at all on the shot material. This process was obviously complicated and labor intensive, and required patience and a good eye. I shot a light study in L.A. and provided it to the team of artists working on the spot, so that we were all clear about the nuances and appearance of real shadows.
The third category of shots required category two work plus additional shadows from objects that did not exist in the scene-such as in the airplane and crane sequences. For these shadows we turned to a CGI approach. Frank and the agency attempted to cover different lighting schemes with the second unit. For example, we might have been provided with a building that was in shadow-but that shadow was in the wrong position to tell the story-and a clean plate that wasn’t in shadow. By combining these plates together we were able to re-light the scene as desired. For scenes where it was not possible to shoot the different plates under different lighting conditions, or where the weather just never cooperated, we used Telecine to grade the shot as hot, flat, normal and crushed, and then combined the various passes, again using mattes to re-light the flat scene.
SHOOT: Can you explain a scene for me? Perhaps the one where she is shaded by the crane-load?
SCOTT: In that shot she’s running in the shadow of a load being carried by a crane. As it wasn’t possible to shoot that, the girl was shot running across the road, while two grips used a large flag to keep her in a square of shadow. This technique often didn’t work completely, as there would be parts of her that did come into sunlight, so we had to re-touch her in those areas. To make the final shot we removed the grips and added a computer-generated shadow of the crane-load over the top of the existing flag shadow. In this particular shot, the computer-generated shadow was achieved by calculating the time of day based on the existing shadows in the scene, and by determining where the crane would be and what kind of height the load would be. We could then calculate mathematically how the load shadow would fall over the road and the girl.
SHOOT: Were there any other effects?
SCOTT: Yes, there were some simple splits, of the girl and traffic. For safety reasons, she was shot separately from the traffic. Another shot that required a different kind of work was the scene where you are looking up at the plane as it passes in front of the sun. That plane was originally traveling across a very cloudy sky, so we replaced it with a sunny sky and graded the plane to near silhouette. Having said this, the majority of the shots were concerned with shadow removal, shadow replacement or shadow enhancement. The idea throughout was to keep the film very natural looking, like it was shot for real. To achieve this we tried to create shadows with all the nuances of their real-life counterparts.
SHOOT: Were you happy with the result?
SCOTT: I think we did a pretty good job; everybody is happy with it. We had enough time to do the job correctly, and we had a large team of people working on it. The process of working with the agency and the director went very smoothly, as they gave us a lot of space to do our work. We were very happy to work with Frank, because he is such a great director.
