Finding the Effects
It’s tough to decide what the most impressive visual effect in Super Bowl XXXVIII was — perhaps the halftime show with the notorious performances by Janet Jackson and Kid Rock, who respectively flaunted anatomy and the flag, to the ire of federal authorities. Or on a game-oriented note, there was the final field goal by the Patriots, sadly crushing any overtime hopes for Panthers’ fans.

The big question about the Super Bowl spots is, where was the CGI? My attention was initially drawn to the FedEx spot, in which an alien monster sits in an office. But a call to Stan Winston Studios informed me that this was all done with animatronics.

But CGI was everywhere, and in subtle ways that are transforming the entire process of filmmaking.

Hi-Wire’s Tony Mills wants his digital enhancements to go unnoticed. That means they worked. Courtesy of Hi-Wire.

Understanding Misunderstood
The premise of this Subway spot was the idea that people who diet by eating at Subway have the right to every once in a while stray from their regimen and eat other snacks — but the dieters misunderstand this, and think that eating at Subway gives them the right to play practical jokes and cause general mayhem -- spraying people with perfume, pouring coffee on their laps and attacking bicycle riders and automobile drivers with kites and toll booth barriers.

Tony Mills of Hi-Wire is pleased that his effects work in the spot is unnoticeable — the action plays like a choreographed slapstick comedy shot in realtime. “The drill was basically to create invisible effects, fixes and things they weren’t able to get in the shoot.”

Visual enhancement was one of Mills’ main goals. “For the perfume spray scene I added CGI spray elements. It’s very subtle. It’s one of those things where you almost have to see it before and after to know how much it enhanced the scene.”

A sequence involving a bike rider hit by a kite used CGI mainly for safety reasons. “They shot a couple of plates, one with the stunt man riding the bike, and another with the stunt man on the bike with a kite strapped to his back, acting like he had just been hit with it. I had to marry those two scenes at the right timing point, and then cut out the kite, and replace it with a CG kite. They’d shot some practical kites falling to the ground, but they didn’t like the action of it, so we rotoed out one frame of it and flew it ourselves, to get exactly the motion they wanted.”

Mills emphasizes how digital effects allow him to create a perfect shot by using elements from numerous shots. “For the scene at the end, where the crossbar hits the guy driving the car — that was a case where we combined all sorts of different takes. The tollbooth attendant was from one scene where they shot him just by himself. The car driving off with the stunt man reacting as if he’s been hit was from another take. I blended those two together, and then I cut out that crossbar from a scene where they had a plate of just the crossbar in its down position. I created a pass that made the bar jiggle because they wanted it to have vibrations, after the guy hit his head. So I created some passes that got the jiggle into it, and then I made it drop down and bonk him on the head.”

Such new methods of staging slapstick shows how far things have come from the days of Buster Keaton.