VTR answers Vodafone's call: this Soho-based studio provided a bevy of Smoke and Flame work for this Europeon spot campaign

Post, March, 2005 by Bob Pank

LONDON -- When a big company commissions a series of commercials, it's hardly surprising that they seek the highest quality finish to impress their customers. So with a global company and an audience of over 600 million, the expectations are high. In this case, the campaign was for Vodafone and the audience: Europe. Of a series of six spots, half were posted at VTR (www.vtr.co.uk) in London's Soho.

Having been in the post biz for 20 years, VTR is well established and has expanded the size and range of its business over that time. However, as managing director Kate Sturgess explains, "We want to be big without losing the good things about being small. People like the friendly boutique style of operation. So today VTR has a thriving d-cinema department as well as a highly-rated 2D and 3D graphics operation called The Hive. Each part is small enough to keep the personal touch while there are other areas of expertise within the group available for support."

VTR itself offers post for high-end commercials, music videos, IDs, channel branding and feature films. The latter, a Specter-based DI operation, Digital Cinema @ VTR, includes in its recent titles Mike Leigh's Oscar-nominated Vera Drake. Blue is involved with broadcast post and TMR majors on film restoration, DVD authoring and multimedia Web services. Sturgess describes how they all interact under the guise of parent company VTR Media Services. "Each part has much to offer and there are overlaps," she notes. "We avoid any internal competition by keeping all the parts talking to each other. They work together and offer a very broad range of services." This soup-to-nuts offering played its part in the Vodafone work.

THE PROJECT

On the face of it, the post should have been routine. But many aspects added to the work needed to get the finished spots out the door. John Trussler, Discreet Smoke and Flame operator at VTR was involved with the Vodafone commercials. He outlines the workflow: "The project was managed in Smoke. Then we shipped out a lot of big shots to Flame while we continued cleaning up shots and cutting the commercial in Smoke." The balance between "as shot" and "post effects" always aimed at creating convincing photoreal results.

Crowd features English soccer great David Beckham watching a goal on his cell phone as the crowd roars. The crowd of thousands was replicated in Flame from a choreographed team of 200 extras. Each shot had to be two-minutes long and shooting throughout a sunny day meant the shadows moved.

The tight contractual obligations and requirements of the star added to the challenge. Discreet Combustion was used to treat some tattoos that had to be blurred and then re-matched to the skin movement that was not only moving in 3D, but also stretching. Placing the video on the cell phone screen was complicated, as it had to look totally convincing--reflections and all.

Airport was another in the series for Vodafone and features a young couple saying goodbye at departure. The phones immediately put them back in touch. Their joy was expressed not only by smiles but also with gravity-defying results. She glides up as he's seen walking on air. The former was relatively straightforward as the wire immediately pulled her clear of other passengers in the foreground, but walking among the check-in queues, sliding along a few inches off the ground was more complex.

The man actually walked just above the floor on a long moving trolley. For realism it was decided to shoot in-situ with moving cameras but budgets ruled out the motion control that would accurately shoot him and then the background with perfect repeated movement. The cameras were manually matched and the background plates were then manually created from the visible pieces.

"There was a shiny floor and this way we get all the reflections of our man and all the other people," explains Trussler. "It looks real but the Flame work took a week."

By contrast, the charming Mimic, where a mother and child make faces at each other, was more finished in camera with much of the commercial comprising alternate shots of the two faces. The director just had to get them to react correctly. Later we see them pull the faces at a distance, over the phone. Ironically, Trussler recalls, "what took longest was trying to remove up to eight tracking points they put on the phone, so I could use the highlight off it. It was worth it as that made all the difference to the realism."

Conforming was handled in Smoke. "Then, we had to do versions for Italy, Germany, Spain, Holland, Ireland and the UK. The whole series required over 100 masters. The UK takes 16:9 full height widescreen, while the rest of Europe takes 14:9 letterbox. You can simply re-size the pictures making them anamorphic, but this is not acceptable to some, so we have to make theirs the right shape."

VTR has much experience with European format requirements. Some consider any black at the top and bottom of 4:3 screens as wasted real estate and demand the footage to be further expanded. "We think the result goes unacceptably soft," Trussler remarks. "So we have to go back and telecine again, and then re-make all the effects. We're basically doing the job twice ... so we encourage customers to stay with the 14:9 version. Hopefully with the onslaught of HD, it will all disappear as everything has to be 16:9."