The 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing have come to a close, but there are two athletes we’ll always remember from the games–14-time Olympic gold medalist Michael Phelps and that hot guy from the GE spot whose discus throw destroyed the Parthenon.
One of the standout ads of the Olympics, “Discus” was created by BBDO New York. “The spot is about wind energy, and it’s a metaphor for what could happen if the wind is not harnessed and goes against you,” BBDO senior creative director/art director Ted Shaine explained.
As we see in the spot, which is set at the ancient Olympic games in Greece, an athlete with the body of a Greek god hurls a discus into the air only to have it thrown way off course by the wind–the object strikes a column of the Parthenon, leading to the collapse of the structure.
GE, which produced three new spots for the summer games (the other two were “Crane” and “Dragon”), wanted to do something lighthearted and fun with “Discus.” “Part of the thinking was, here you are watching the Olympics, and at first [this commercial] looks like another one of those big, corporate ‘proud to be a sponsor of the Olympics’ spots, but then it turns into this thing with a sense of humor and a twist, and it makes a very simple point about wind energy,” related Shaine.”
While the story was simple, the production was anything but simple. BBDO hired directing collective Traktor (Pontus Lowenhielm and Sam Larsson took the lead on this job), which is repped by Partizan, to orchestrate these ancient Olympics, while the The Mill, N.Y., created assorted VFX. “I don’t want to give any trade secrets away, but I think the only thing that was real in this spot was the guy’s pecs,” Shaine cracked.
By the way, actor Anderson Davis plays the discus thrower. The directors cast a wide net, looking at actors with the appropriately chiseled bodies from Greece, Italy, Croatia and France. In the end, they found Davis in Los Angeles. “This guy gave a great performance,” Shaine said, noting, “A lot of that has to do with the agency and the directors collaborating until we got that one piece that was some good comedy. Comedy’s not easy.”
Meanwhile, Traktor and The Mill got a workout trying to figure out how to approach this spot. “We did a lot of pre-vis and conference calls with Traktor in the initial stages,” explained The Mill VFX supervisor Alex Lovejoy.
Ultimately Traktor wanted to create a mix of live action, CG and practical effects. Traktor and DP Chris Doyle shot the live action scenes with the discus thrower and his admirers on location in Croatia for two days. A third day was used to shoot background plates both on 35mm and digital stills.
Everything else you see in the spot was created in air-conditioned suites in New York and New Zealand.
Back at The Mill, the 3D team used the plates shot in Croatia to create the landscape seen in the spot’s opening wide shot. The 3D team also enhanced the crowd, making it appear as though there were thousands of spectators through the use of Massive software, and The Mills 2D team pitched in, tiling together multiple live-action plates of the extras that were used for the mid-foregrounds.
The discus was replaced with an animated one. “I don’t think our lead character is a discus thrower, but he wasn’t bad at throwing the discus. He actually managed to throw it a reasonable distance,” The Mill lead Flame artist Dan Williams said. “But we took out his discus and replaced it with one that flew higher and faster.”
Building the Parthenon The Parthenon was constructed through a combination of miniatures and CG. Miniatures NZ in Wellington, New Zealand, built the front portion of the Parthenon (it was so tall at 14-feet high that the directors refer to it as a “bigature”), then shot it collapsing.
Explaining why a partial miniature was employed, “You get lots of lovely things for free if you like when you do a miniature in how it collapses–you get little bits breaking off, little bits of dust. Just how everything interacts, it all happens for natural. That’s the way it would happen in the real environment, in the real world, and it’s something that would be very difficult and very time consuming to create CG-wise,” Lovejoy explained.
The Mill created CG extensions to build out the rest of the Parthenon.
“One of the lovely finishing touches was we did a tape-to-tape grade on the final spot,” Lovejoy pointed out. (The Mill’s Fergus McCall was the colorist.) “So we finished all of the CG work and compositing in Flame, and we went to the telecine, and we applied a little bit more contrast and overall grade to balance all of the shots.”
Additional credit for “Discus” goes to editor Ian MacKenzie of New York’s MacKenzie Cutler. “He was fantastic,” said Shaine of MacKenzie. “He made his first cut and as soon as the cut was done, we knew it was going to be really funny. I would say of all the things I’ve been involved in lately, this one cut together pretty seamlessly right from the beginning.”
