Reebok 'Classics'

Director: Jack Lawrence
Agency: Everyone Associates
Production: Armoury
Client: Reebok

As usual with the current trend is that it is easier to do it in 3D than for real, but in this case like quite a lot others that was not the case so after a bit of thinking we arrived to the conclusion that it would be better for the project to avoid any CG at all and just rely on a simple technique to put the line markings in the floor.

We discussed painting and putting some sort of masking to spray the paint but it occurred to me that gaffer tape was perfect. The only thing was that we needed to be able to put it down really quickly, as we didn’t have permission to stop the traffic in London and be able to take it back even faster, so we can move on.

After a few tests, we realised that two people who know what they are trying to do with it could lay down easily 300 metres of gaffer tape in 5 minutes, and therefore we could fill a very long street without too much of a problem.

Here is our runner helping with testing for the director, the technique just before the shoot, something we did research before, of course.

Of course, we didn’t have time for laser measurements or anything like that; we just approached by eye and made sure we could dirty the tape quickly by walking over on the way back, then we would correct the lines in Nuke.

We didn’t bother with the horizontal or numbers as that was the factor that would have slowed us down, and was very easy to do in post so we went to the shoot with 30 rolls of gaffer tape and literally bombarded the streets with it, shoot and peel the tape off quickly for the next shot.

I was super happy because the director could see what he was doing, the DoP could frame the camera, the talent would know where the lanes were, and overall, the feeling was perfect.

How we did it

Of course, the jobs where we looked under the highway were done in CG, but what we did was use photographs to construct them. When we shot, we did choose the architecture carefully so we could work with something, as you can see in the next images (sorry for the poor quality, but that is all I could get at that point).

The tricky thing was curves, as these needed to be put together also very quickly, and it is not trivial to construct nice curves with tape, so I remembered a technique from my old days in the university studying technical drawing and started to use 3-point arcs to do it together with mapping the radius very quickly. Here you can see the actual system in place while we were training in a corner of the office.

And here you have a clean setup in the office.

It is really fun to think that after so many years doing high-end effects for advertising, I rely more and more every time on the simplest practical tricks to make sure we put the right time into the real meat rather than having lots of shots to do and not finish any.

Conclusion
A refreshing approach to something everybody was counting on would be CG… and looks good too, so what else can I hope for?