Invensys “Beer”
- Article 2 of 6
- The Post, November 2000
Visual effects meet special effects for Invensys' latest campaign.
“The agency had a very clear idea of what they wanted,” says Chris Hartwill. “With any job, you have to get into their heads, find out where they’re coming from initially then enhance it as much as possible. You do an awful lot of talking.”
Hartwill’s challenge from the creatives was to enhance their idea for Invensys’ latest campaign, in which the camera follows a molecule through the production line of a brewery. To do it involved motorcycle escorts, an Archimedes screw and a lipstick camera.
“In-camera gives you an imperceptible and almost spontaneous look you can’t get when you control every element of a shot,” Hartwill argues. “It’s more believable when it’s in-camera and you use post-production effects just to blend elements together. I try not to do more than 30% of shots in post.” Which is why, although it might have been easier to call in a graphics team, he called on Bob Thorne of Artem to design and build a whole plethora of models for the commercial.
Not that everything was necessarily a “model”. Hartwill insisted on many of the items used for the visual effects being near full size. A giant tank, used as the basis for all the tanks in the commercial, had to be made as big as Artem’s studio – with just a one-inch gap round either side of the tank as it came in through the entrance on specially-designed skates after being escorted as a ‘wide load’ by outriders from the manufacturer. A company that specialises in building Archimedes screws was commissioned to create one two feet in diameter and 1.5 metres tall. And a live-size replica control console had to be built because there was only one in the country.
Rushes’ cgi team met with Artem and Hartwill on several occasions at the former company’s studios. “We had more to do with the post guys than we usually do,” says Thorne. “We discussed what elements we should provide them and gave them textures and a tube so they could get good digital shots of stuff.”
Rushes cgi artist and Inferno operator Bill McNamara says, “The main object was to get some shots that were impossible to achieve in-camera.” A good example is when the molecule turns a corner in the pipe: the shot initially is live-action, with a camera being passed down the inside of a pipe specially made by Thorne, but the 90-degree turn would have been impossible for a camera. So at the turn, the shot becomes cgi instead of live-action.
In all, the team spent over 500 hours on the project, most of the work coming from the so-called invisible shots. McNamara recalls that just about every frame was worked on to some degree, but sometimes it was simply to match the lighting with previous frames or to add ripples to water.
“What I like most about the job is it wasn’t a gratuitous use of special effects,” muses McNamara. “It wasn’t just doing explosions. It wasn’t something by George Lucas.”
As if to back him up, the main draw of the commercial among other directors, according to Hartwill, was a simple shot from the point of view of a bottle of beer on a conveyer belt. “The only thing that would fit was a lipstick camera. But I didn’t want this one video shot when the rest was film. So I played back the footage from the camera on a monitor and filmed it. It gave it a video come film grain. Of all the things in the commercial, that’s the one I’ve been asked most about.”