The term "visual effects" often conjures up striking, computer generated imagery. So it’s ironic that some effects artists create work that, ideally, can’t be seen at all. As James Bygrave, a visual effects artist who works on the Henry out of The Finish Line, Santa Monica, puts it, "A lot of the stuff I do tends to be invisible—and that’s the way it should be."
Bygrave recently finished work on a couple of Nike Shox spots directed by Alan White of bicoastal/ international @radical. media via Wieden+Kennedy, Portland, Ore. Bygrave had worked on an earlier batch of Nike Shox ads, but this second set proved more challenging.
"The original [commercials] were going to be purely in-camera, but we did end up doing a little clean-up work," he explains. "Still, overall, the first series was pretty straightforward. What then became a little bit more complicated was the second series. [The agency] contacted us before they filmed anything, because they had a very short schedule."
For the new ads, Wieden wanted to match previously shot backgrounds with new footage done on a green screen. One of the newer spots, "Big Head," even incorporated foreground footage from an earlier shoot—while the ad appears to be one seamless shot, it actually is composed of material from the two different shoots.
One of the humorous ads shows a person entering a room and sitting in a folding chair. He wears an enormous football helmet—many times bigger than normal. Behind him are a basketball hoop and backboard. We hear a "boing, boing" sound as another man runs right at the seated man, leaps over him and dunks a basketball. Then a third man charges in and knocks the football-helmeted man over. The spot ends with a shot of the word "Boing."
Footage of the ball player jumping and dunking the ball was taken from the first shoot. The parts that show Big Head’s entrance and Big Head getting knocked over were filmed during the second shoot. "It was all put on the original background," notes Bygrave. "We matched camera angles and used a mix overlay package on the shoot."
DIVERSE PROJECTS
More of Bygrave’s subtle, precise work appears in Toyota Tundra’s "Gnome," directed by Tom DeCerchio of bicoastal Morton Jankel Zander, via Saatchi and Saatchi LA, Torrance, Calif. "Gnome" features a man named Bob reading a magazine, while enjoying coffee and donuts at a roadside diner. Nearby, a folksy figurine sits mutely on the counter, but his thoughts are audible. When the little figure spots a magazine image of a Toyota Tundra, he excitedly thinks, "Bob, that’s your truck!" and when he sees Bob eating donuts, he warns, "Keep eatin’ those donuts, you’re gonna be a full-size truck!"
Bygrave explains that the ad called for "straightforward color correction techniques to separate the gnome from the background. We also had to put new copy in the magazine, and we created a new page with all the right reflections."
Bygrave made several contributions to Sony Playstation’s "Targets," as well—an ad directed by Brian Beletic of bicoastal/international Satellite via TBWA/Chiat/ Day, San Francisco. The commercial shows a hockey player practicing his deadly slapshot. When he hears jeering from the empty arena’s stands, he promptly fires a puck at the culprit—a cutout figure of a fan—who explodes when hit by the puck. After nailing a growling bear cutout and sparing a cutout of a flirtatious woman, the player fires a shot at a taunting broadcaster in his booth, shattering the enclosure’s protective glass. The ad ends with the image of an action-packed video hockey game.
"My job on that was to composite the hockey pucks into the shots," notes Bygrave. "They were shot revolving on a green screen. I animated them and added motion blur." The image of the broadcasting booth’s glass shattering was actually composed of three separate shots. "That was a three-part composite: the foreground element, the glass element and the background seen through the glass. When the glass shatters, that’s actually just a cut to a real pane of glass shattering," he adds.
The international 7-Up spot "Tank," directed by John Frankenheimer via bicoastal Aegis, through Goodby Silverstein & Partners, San Francisco, required extensive visual effects work. The ad opens with a teenage couple at an outdoor food cart. A kid on a bike suddenly speeds by, swiping the guy’s bottle of 7-Up. The act triggers a James Bond fantasy in the victim’s head. Sporting a tuxedo, he drives a tank through a brick wall and coolly pursues the offender through city streets. After wreaking much havoc, the hero corners the thief, who is forced to return the 7-Up. "There’s quite a lot in there," observes Bygrave. The shot where "the boy cycles towards [the viewer] and the wall behind him crashes down and the tank bursts through was a green screen composite," he explains. "[The boy was] shot with the green screen on the wall. Then they took the green screen away and shot the tank actually breaking through that wall, and I put the two together.
"There is another scene where the boy on the bicycle is riding and a car explodes," he continues. "That was stitching two different takes together. We took the explosion from one take and tracked that to another take of the boy riding. I had to cut and paste and animate some extra flames to cover up some joins. They were handheld camera moves, so we had to track one against the other. Also, we added a little bit of extra smoke to join the seam between the two different takes."
Bygrave, who was born in Hong Kong, studied chemistry at Bristol University, Bristol, England, but left the school before graduating. Later he took a job as a runner at Soho 601, London. He eventually moved into visual effects work there, and ended up spending eight years with the company, before joining The Finish Line in 1996.
When asked to compare working in the U.S. and European markets, Bygrave responds with a laugh, "You get paid overtime here.
"It’s much more collaborative with the production companies and the directors in Europe," he says, more seriously. "It’s not unusual [overseas] for the director to be in the online and compositing sessions. Then the agency will come in at the end. Here, I hardly ever see a director."
Bygrave says that the weather lured him to California. "I really wanted a change in lifestyle. I had grown up in the Far East and moved to England when I was eleven. I think I still missed the sunshine and the weather." And his current locale makes it easy for Bygrave to partake in one of his favorite activities: He points out that "Deep sea fishing, for tuna and marlin, is my main passion. That’s what I’m doing when I’m not at work."
