Budweiser’s spot with the Clydesdale snowball fight was a sequel to last year’s successful ad. The horses looked capable of rolling their own snowballs here. © DDB. Courtesy of Quiet Man Inc.

For the Clydesdale spot, Taylor explains that each scene was computer-generated vs. shot live -- carefully pieced together so that none of it looked remotely close to fake. “Those Clydesdales are very well trained, but when you come back and look at the film and wonder why the baby Clydesdale is standing a certain way, next thing you know you’re taking it apart for the perfect scene I’m not even sure exists in nature,” she says.

Snapshot That Grooves
Olympus developed two spots promoting its m:robe 500 that the camera company described as “high-energy odysseys of music, photography and dance.” To showcase the device, billed as the first digital music player that also snaps photos, the spots feature funky electronica music, cool Poplockin’ dance techniques and unusual effects.

Ironically, the “Let Your Pictures Groove” theme proved to be a final snapshot in a body of work done by Creocollective. Director Dave Meyer of @radical media, which approached the now defunct vfx boutique house in Santa Monica, wanted to manipulate the dancing from his choreographer for unreal-looking contortions.

This posed numerous technical challenges for vfx supervisor Jean Marc Demmer and his executive producer, Jennifer Sofio, who were charged with matching the bodies of a half-dozen young and hip street dancers with the heads of an unlikely cast of characters featuring an elderly Asian couple dressed as tourists, little boy playing piñata at his birthday party, two bridesmaids and a couple of football tailgaters.

Creocollective’s swan song were spots for the m:robe 500. Vfx artists had to match the bodies of a half-dozen young street dancers with the heads of an unlikely cast of characters. © Olympus Imaging America Inc.

Using the tools of hair, makeup and wardrobe, as well as color correction for skin tones, blending and scaling, helped make the 6-year-old boy look his age considering that a 30-year-old African American male performed all his moves.

“We also did some simpler things like set extension and additional color correction because the compositing we did was really complex,” Sofio explains. “Sometimes we took an arm from one take and added it onto a body in another take. Everyone in the spot is a kind of Frankenstein. The idea was to find the best mix of body parts to produce extraordinary dancing.”

In the event of a need for head replacement, 3D scans were taken of all the heads -- though the spot ended up staying with 2D technology. At the end of the day, Sofio believes compositing when used in its simplest form makes for the best visual effects.