wild(child) editorial recently merged alternate realities in the :30 "Gol" for Verizon Wireless and agency GlobalHue.
In "Gol," an overworked waiter in a classy restaurant takes a quick look around before whipping out his Verizon Wireless phone with V CAST streaming mobile video. As the World Cup action appears, wait staff and restaurant patrons are suddenly suspended frozen in time, and the V CAST-using waiter imagines a soccer game magically breaking out inside. Glowing electric blue like athletic phantasms, a translucent squad of players appear to kick the ball through the aisles, dive over tabletops, and slide victoriously down the long bar. Rejuvenated, the waiter shuts the phone, the soccer team vanishes and the restaurant around him comes back to life.
wild(child) editor Nick Tomnay says that "making the live action and the visual effects meet believably was a big challenge." He adds, "The other objective was to make sure that the audience understood exactly what was happening: that two worlds were intermingling as this team of World Cup soccer players begins competing in a frozen restaurant."
Tomnay established the restaurant shots as a background plate, then seamlessly combined it with the footage of the soccer players, who were shot running through light smoke against a black background (as opposed to the traditional green screen) to diffuse the light surrounding them. Along the way, Tomnay's ability to select the best "frozen moments" for emphasizing the soccer action was a subtly critical component.
"It was all about accommodating the flow of the soccer players ? how do you best place them in the frame?" he says. "The idea that GlobalHue had was to have a lot of movement in the restaurant, so that when we took a freeze, we did it where there would be a lot of suspended action in the still frame. For example, there's a moment we used where a man is passing his glass, a woman is dropping a napkin, and another woman is turning her head. Sometimes I also did some copy-and-paste work, combining different frames to create a new one for maximum action."
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Production Company: RSA/La Division
Director: Nick Livesey
Exec. Producer: Ed Rivero
Advertising Agency/city/state: Global Hue
Group Creative Director: Ricardo Trejo
Group Creative Director: Lorena Vogeler
HP: Nettie Marquez
Editor: Nick Tomnay
Executive Producer: Alexandra Leal