John Myers of Ring of Fire did a lot of subtle digital work for the Bud Donkey ads. Courtesy of Ring of Fire.

CGI as Safeguard
John Myers of Ring of Fire created effects for the charming Budweiser spot in which a little donkey auditions to march with famous Budweiser Clydesdales.

My first impression was that the little donkey’s bray — an almost ear-splitting honk, must have been an effect, or somehow enhanced and extended by CGI. But Myers corrected me. “No! The unique thing about the donkey is that it actually does that hee-haw bray. The producers had found this little donkey and they had written the spot around him.” As always in film production, working with animals presented special difficulties. “The main concern was safety for the donkey. Were he to fall down and be trampled it would have been a very bad situation, so we designed shots with that in mind.”

Special preparation was needed to choreograph the animals’ movements. “We did quite a bit of rig removal. They had a lot of guide wires and lines on the donkey to help lead him where he needed to go. In the scene where the Clydesdales are lined up inside the stable and the donkey comes in for his interview—that’s a split-screen composite, combining scenes of the animals shot at different times. And in the later shot when donkey leads the pack of Clydesdales, we shot the little donkey walking by himself — he had wires and cables and reins and all kinds of crazy stuff sticking off of him — and then we shot the Clydesdale team, without a Clydesdale in that position. Then we integrated it, married it and took out the rigs.”

Various enhancements helped give the animals a heightened sense of personality. “The close up of the Clydesdales, where their ears all perk up at the same time, each one of those ears is a split-screen composite, so they all do what they need to do at the exact same time.”

Shot at Ulysses S. Grant’s farm in Atlanta, the spot has a warm, old-time look. “We did digital clean-up and made everything look idyllic, creating a beautiful shimmering atmosphere. Pretty much in every scene there was some little thing we did — whether it was an isolation matte or a hold-out matte, integrated alternate color correction of the back barn wall, or correcting the black tones in the opening scene to warm it up. We did lighting passes to add atmosphere, enhancing the light rays coming through the barn, to make it look like you’d want to be there.”

Myers points out that with such subtle work, it is often difficult to show clients exactly what was done to improve a shot. “The majority of work that Ring of Fire does is invisible. We show our demo reel and people say, where are the effects? It’s a great compliment, but it’s hard to describe what we actually did. That’s where the before and after comparisons come in — so people can see how subtle enhancements change the whole feel of a scene.”