Some Holiday magic and last minute ideas

 

This past Christmas, the Richmarc crew teamed up with Martin's Super Markets to create a spot that combined some holiday magic with a little movie magic.   (Screen Spot)

 

 

THE BACK STORY—It’s Always About the Weather

The holidays seem to come earlier every year, especially for Martin's. Not wanting to fall into the trap of the last minute crazies of the holidays, Martin's and Richmarc started preparing for their holiday spot in May.

 

But even with five months of planning, exterior shooting means a chance of weather. 

 

The shoot was supposed to be two 12 hour days, the second day scheduled for additional interiors and night exterior shots, including plates for the Visual Effects crew to create the ending with the snow globe.

 

As the shoot dates neared, it became clear that rain would arrive in time to wash us out of the night exteriors on the second day.  We could not flip days because the interiors had to be shot on Monday because of lighter store traffic.  

 

When it was clear we’d be rained on Tuesday evening producer, Joyce Thompson, met with the client and crew to pitch the idea of a very long day Monday, to pick up the night exteriors after the interior shooting was wrapped. 

 

Everyone agreed it was the only logical and cost-effective solution.  “We were running under budget on the project and I was able to re-direct that savings to cover the additional crew overtime that we’d incur by shooting into Monday evening,” Thompson said, “and with such a complex production, keeping the crew and equipment for a third day would have been far more expensive and put the production over budget.”

 

Six-year-old Berkeley, the star of the spot, was especially excited for the decision, given it would be the first time she'd ever stayed up past 11 p.m.

 

Scene One:  The Night The Lights Went Out in Granger

The solution had solved the weather issue but not the store’s exterior lighting.

 

The last set-up was the opening scene of the store front with the sign and store lobby lit, family walking in.  It was nearing midnight and the store was closed, but the store front lobby and sign were lit and the lighting crew had the entire exterior lit.  We had reasonable intel that those lights would be on all night.

 

So after three rehearsals to get the choreography and camera crane move right, the camera was rolling just in time to catch the store’s outdoor lights shut off, including the all-important Martin's sign. It was on a master timer and no way to get it back on.  We were wrapped.

 

“I have been in the habit of shooting rehearsals ever since we got into HD.  It costs nothing and we’ve caught some magic moments,” commented Thompson.

 

The third take was just right, the crane move perfect and the family hit their marks and the performance was very natural.  Safe at first.

 

Let It Snow, Outside and INSIDE

Bringing the cold Christmas weather inside, however, was no easy task.

 

Richmarc enlisted the help of James Beaver and put him in charge of changing the aisles of Martin's into a winter wonderland. From filling the store with snow and building a realistic igloo to assembling a homemade snow machine, James created an interior winter landscape that even Frosty would be proud to call home.  “We needed snow falling in several areas of the store, each requiring different rigs to make it work.  James and his crew made it happen, quickly and efficiently,” according to Rick,  “There are a handful of people that I appreciate having on my crew and James is one of them.  He delivers beyond expectations, always has terrific ideas, solutions and his taste in décor, color and design is impressive.  I know when James is on the job the sets are going to look perfect.”

 

But it was his icicle cart that really started the magic and set the spot in motion.

 

Scene Two:  Calling The Audible And A Willing Client.

The original script had the family walking in being greeted by the store manager and handed a cart with icicles already on it.  But Rick saw the cart as a way to get the magic started right away.

 

According to Rick, “On the second day of shooting we were scheduled for the cart scene last.  I kept thinking about it wondering if there wasn’t a way to introduce the “magic” aspect of the story there visually, rather than expecting the audience to get it.  It seemed to me there had to be a way to put some fun and magic into this scene as we’d done in all the other scenes so I approached the Martin’s folks with the idea that the cart would magically transform from a regular cart to one covered with icicles.  We landed on the notion that little Berkeley would run in and provide a magical touch of the cart to transition it to the icicles and it’s “magic” as seen through the eyes of our six-year-old.”

 

The client questioned the complexity of such a shot, having to match perfectly the regular cart and the icicle cart, the effect, etc.  A few years ago, Rick might've agreed. But having F800 camera and a thorough knowledge of its capabilities, Rick said he could make it happen. 

 

Not long ago this would have been an impossible shot to do without green screen.  But with a feature called “freeze mix” built into the F800’s tool set, this shot became simple to accomplish.  Freeze mix superimposes a single image, in our case, a shot of the regular cart with no one in the shot, onto the viewfinder. Then the regular cart is removed and the icicle cart is placed in EXACTLY the same position by viewing a superimposed image of BOTH carts.  When the second cart is positioned correctly the two images merge into one, indicating you have a perfect match.   Then bring in Berkeley and her family with the store manager, choreographing them so there would be no “cross traffic” behind the cart until the effect was complete and the shot was complete.

 

Blaine Morehead at Scofield Editorial, Indianapolis, added just exactly the right effect to transition the two carts and precisely capture the ‘magic’ that gets this spot going with the right emotion.

 

Off to a good start, but the real treat of the spot is the twist at the end.

 

 

 

HOW DID YOU DO THAT??

 

“The snow globe ending turned a great concept into pure magic,” said Rick.

 

And while the concept was great, the real payoff for Rick and his crew was bringing it to life. With so many components, such a shot would prove complicated, but well worth it.

 

To ensure the snow globe shot was done perfectly, Richmarc partnered with the Visual Effects department at1080, Inc., a well-respected post-production house based in San Antonio, Texas.

 

They were even so thorough as to send a graphics consultant to the shoot in Granger, IN to work with Rick to make sure the angle, camera movement, depth of field, lenses and all the other elements would match up perfectly when transitioning from live action to graphics.

 

The family coming out of the store needed to be a high angle, but how high.  This would determine the arithmetic and geometrics for the rest of the work on the effect.  Leaving nothing to chance, Richmarc went to the location last summer with a crane to test heights and camera angles on the front of the store to determine precisely where the shot would be done.  Once that was determined, the other metrics would fall into place.

 

Creating the Store Front in CGI

Rick shot nearly 100 stills of the store front from every conceivable angle, close-ups of the brick and siding, signs, dimensionality, and so on, allowing the artists at 1080 to build an exact replica of the building in CGI which would be placed electronically in the empty snow globe—it did have water and sparkles in it but nothing else.

 

When Jeff Stoyer from 1080 arrived, he spent several hours with laser equipment measuring distances, angles of inclination, angles of camera offset and other data to help them mathematically design the building to the correct scale.

 

Shooting the pullout

The exterior “plates” were actually quite quick to shoot.  First, we shot the family from the same camera angle as we would shoot the pull out so the perspective would be correct.  Zoomed all the way in to see JUST the family walking out, we did several takes of that.  Next, with no one in the frame, the camera was framed for the front door area where the family was walking out and then the camera pulls back.  We shot the pull back at several speeds to have options in post.  What would eventually happen with these two shots is that the family would be inserted into the zoom out from the store.  By doing it this way we could ramp the speed of the zoom to make the transition seamlessly into the snow globe part of the shot.  By having the family as a separate element, whatever we did with the speed of the zoom had NO effect on the speed of the family.  Once the zoom out and family shots were selected, the VFX crew did a process called rotoscoping, where they trace around the family, in this case and create a matte of each frame--for about 400 frames--so they could be dropped into the zoom subsequently in front of the computer-generated store.

 

 

Shooting the Snow Globe and Berkeley

To save money James Beaver and his crew built a two-wall set in a conference room at the store.  This saved a lot of time and money because it eliminated a company move to a studio.  It was tight but it worked.

 

Some math:  And let’s keep this simple.  The ‘field of view’ of the store was based upon the camera at a particular distance from the store front and that shot was made with a zoom lens.  However, given the size of the snow globe, about six inches in diameter, and the distance from the camera to the snow globe in relation to the distance from the camera to the store front, a calculation was done to determine which lens would be needed, in this case a 20mm.  And, it had to be a prime lens to accurately maintain a correct perspective between the store exterior shot and the snow globe shot, and being a prime lens had to be placed on a dolly to get the pull out accomplished.

 

Get out the laser pointers and nerves of steel

Dolly grip, Tom Pielemeier and Camera Assistant, Sharon Alley designed an ingenious set up to track the dolly move in relationship to the focus.  Rick was shooting wide open which meant little depth of field.  Focus would be unforgiving so it had to be right the entire move or the take was spoiled.  Tom rigged a laser device on the dolly and then set marks on the floor coinciding with focus marks that Sharon was setting on the camera.  It only took a couple of takes to find the groove and we were off and running, getting varying speeds on the dolly move and a variety of reactions from Berkeley, who did a great job imaging there was actually something inside that otherwise empty snow globe.

 

The details that made the difference

Every lens has ‘issues’ and in order for VFX to work well you need to find out what those issues are and note them so they can be calculated into the final metrics of the VFX solution.  So, the lenses were put on a grid and shot to determine their accuracy.  The zoom lens had to be charted at certain points throughout its zoom range because there are things like distortion and drift that will change the look of the image enough to be noticeable.  The VFX crew did comment that the zoom lens used on this shoot (part of the Richmarc inventory, a Fujinon Cine Style lens) had very little to no distortion or drift compared to a lot of other lenses they see).

 

Make it look real, reflections and all

Glass is reflective but we minimized that so the CGI placement of the store would work well and then the 1080 VFX crew would add in reflections.  We shot reflections using what would appear to be a chrome basketball placed precisely where the snow globe was.  The VFX crew would be able to peel off those reflections and lay them on the glass and then vary the transparency.   And for color accuracy, we shot another sphere that was a pure gray that would give the colorist very accurate reading on the color.

 

Last minute idea

After seeing the rough cut (by John Scofield, Scofield Editorial) of the live action, the request came from Martin’s to “juice up” the closing graphics, which were to be simple text cards.  But after seeing how each scene had something magical about it, they wanted to keep that going with the graphics.  Blaine came up with a lovely treatment of the graphics, animated and looking as if they were falling into frame like snowflakes.   Assembly, color, compositing and finishing were handled by Carl Wurtz at Scofield Editorial. 

 

 

 

Music

Jeff Gerson, Sound Thinking, handled the music.  Tchaikovsky's Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy we learned, is part of public domain but none of the performances are so, Jeff recreated the piece adding in cues based on the action throughout the spot. 

 

Hey!  It worked!!

All the hours of meticulous measuring and tedious tasks paid off. The result was a seamless finishing shot that sets the Martin's spot apart from other holiday ads. A shot that everyone involved can be proud to say they worked on.

 

That’s a wrap.

The feedback from viewers, according to Martin's, has been all positive. And that's not just because people were in their cheerful holiday mood. The spot did so well, it even had customers asking where they could buy the Martin's snow globe. 

 

If you have questions about any of the specifics of the production of this spot, please contact Joyce or Rick at Richmarc.  (317) 923.FILM (3456)