Brian Drewes of Brickyard FX made sure that the shards of glass looked real in these spoofy anti-smoking ads. Courtesy of Brickyard FX.

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For the Shards of Glass anti-smoking spot, a Popsicle factory is shown creating Popsicles full of crushed glass, while factory representatives tell a tour group that despite the dangers, consumers have a choice in using their product. The spot cleverly spoofs the fulsome anti-smoking spots produced by tobacco companies.

Brian Drewes from Brickyard FX points out that the visual effects were done mainly for safety. “We shot in a actual Popsicle factory, and one of the complications was that they don’t want glass anywhere near their molds or equipment, so in any place where you are seeing glass, those are all set pieces we created. We did a lot of enhancements of the glass shards that are set in the Popsicles — there are lighting flares to make them gleam and look sharper. And we added a lot of larger chunks of glass, using CG modeling of broken bottles.”

Henry Turner is a writer and award-winning filmmaker, whose Lovecraft-inspired horror feature, Wilbur Whateley, won top awards at the Chicago International Film Festival. His writing on film has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, L’ecran Fantastique, Variety and many other publications. A longtime film festival executive, he has programmed for the Slamdance Film Festival, and currently heads FilmTraffick L.A.