Can you shoot a TV spot with still cameras? Apparently, yes. Director Andrew Douglas of Anonymous Content did just that for Canon, and the result is “Journey,” a cleverly executed array of pictures in motion.
The :30 from Grey New York promotes Canon’s new EOS Rebel XSi and NFL sponsorship by piecing together the arc of a football play through a range of scenarios, starting with the hike in a backyard game all the way to a touchdown in a stadium.
According to Grey SVP/creative director Ari Halper, the goal was to make the end product, the photograph, the hero as opposed to the camera itself.
As the journey from amateur to pro football progresses in the spot, the quality of the photos improves, noted Halper, paralleling the journey one takes as a photographer “when you step up and you get an SLR [the Rebel], and you start to look at the world with a more artful eye.”
Douglas said he was taken with the narrative because it presented him with the challenge of threading a single story through multiple environments. Determined to tell the tale through the use of still images, he consulted with Santa Monica-based effects shop Asylum to find the most effective technique. During the phase, Asylum came across a Microsoft technology demo of Photosynth, software that allows the creation of virtual environments out of a photo library. “The technology is amazing,” remarked Asylum VFX supervisor Paul O’Shea.
Photosynth is in test mode right now, but using it as inspiration, O’Shea worked with his team to put together a pre-vis of moving stills. Providing Douglas with a pre-vis to show the agency and client was important in selling them on the proposed approach. O’Shea said, “It would have been quite a leap of faith unless you saw something.”
The agency and client were intrigued by the methodology and awarded Douglas the job. He then put his plan into motion, shooting at various locations. At each site, he would stage the scene, line up a pack of 10 photographers that included himself, DP Flor Collins and crew members, then have them shoot the action simultaneously as it played out.
“We built the scenes as if we were filming them,” Douglas said. “We built them to have a certain shape, and then we tried to deliver something with the cameras that was a little bit like a tracking shot I suppose.”
He captured every scene from a dizzying variety of angles and depths.
Frame-by-frame edit Then it was up to editor Michael Elliot of Mad River Post, New York, to sort through the images, create scenes and fashion them into a spot. Initially, Elliot thought he could simply import the images into and cut “Journey” on the Avid. But he realized that he and Douglas would need to see the pictures in their full photographic resolution. So Elliot got creative, purchasing a copy of Adobe’s Photoshop Lightroom for its organizational tools. He wound up cutting the job in Lightroom, adapting it to his purposes.
Elliot culled through 70,000 images, using somewhere between 160 to 170 to build the seven scenes depicted in the spot. It was a time-consuming process. “Instead of making twenty to thirty edits to make the commercial, I was cutting the spot on a frame by frame basis,” Elliot related.
In creating each scene, Elliot tried to stretch the action across the frame “so that when it went to Asylum, they could mirror that movement–not by zooming or panning on the shots but by stacking them up in a scheme that would cause the movement to unfold across the screen.”
Asylum’s O’Shea said that Elliot would send an EDL over, then Inferno artist Miles Essmiller wrote script to conform the images and make them into Flame-acceptable formats.
Once the images were loaded into Flame, O’Shea and his team would lay out the sequences. There was a lot of back and forth between Asylum and Elliot to get each scene just right. The tinkering, which involved Douglas and the agency, went well into the second week of the job when normally everything would be locked. But given the experimental nature of what they were doing, it was necessary for everyone to be flexible.
Sound decision Composer Michael Montes of New York’s Sacred Noise produced a simple piano track, which is mixed with sound design [by Mad River’s Lisa Lavallee] and the voice of a sports commentator. “One of the things that my partner [SVP/creative director Stephen Krauss] had said early on, and I agreed, was that as big of a visual impact this spot would have, the music and sound design would be every bit as important,” Halper said.
Elliot noted, “To break out and do something different is very rare, and this was a circumstance where Canon wanted this to be about photography, and it became less about the image of the company and more about the idea of how to make photography live in motion. That freed up the process so we would be able to experiment.”
