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NFL | Super Bowl LIV: “The Next 100”

NFL: “The Next 100: Super Bowl LIV”

NFL: “The Next 100: Super Bowl LIV Teaser: Hot Dog Cart”

NFL: “The Next 100: Super Bowl LIV Teaser: One Take”

NFL: “The Next 100: Super Bowl LIV Teaser: Aaron Donald and Joey Bosa”

NFL: “The Next 100: Super Bowl LIV Teaser: Jugs Machine”

LONG-FORM COMMERCIAL | SOCIAL TEASERS
ROLE: Senior Flame Artist / VFX Compositor
VENDOR: The Mill
CLIENT: NFL
AGENCY: 72andSunny
PRODUCTION CO: Prettybird
DIRECTOR: Max Malkin

How do you top last years’ NFL Super Bowl entry “The 100 Year Game,” which featured just about every NFL star player your could think of?

You not only do the same, but you take it on the road, cross-country and coast-to-coast, in a game to end all games.

This year’s long-form NFL spot for Super Bowl LIV features a young boy, playing football in a rural town, who decides the field just isn’t big enough, and opts to keep running past the goal and beyond. Along his path, he encounters numerous NFL vets and pros, urging him to “Take it to the House Kid.”

When he finally arrives at the Hard Rock Stadium in Florida, the filmed spot segues into a live broadcasted segment of the boy, and a crowd of young football fans, entering the stadium, delivering the ball for the game kick-off. The finished spot spliced in the live portion for subsequent broadcast.

“The Next 100” was a massive project, at 2.5 minutes in length, with upwards to 100 effects shots, 20+ unique social deliverables, and a little under a week and a half to finish it all. The team was large, lead by The Mill’s Adam Lambert, with numerous senior artists working as fast as possible to deliver the project early enough to allow rehearsals for the live televised segment. To top it all off, none of us was really quite sure if it was actually going to work.

As I did for the previous year’s “The 100 Year Game,” I primarily handled all the social deliverables for “The Next 100,” four of which are included above. These featured shots from the long-form spot, as well as unique takes, and additional or extended shots. Some of my shots ended up in the long-form. Some long-form shots ended up in the socials. And whenever I had downtime, I picked up additional work from the long-form.

It was a big, high-speed juggling act that required everyone to be in top-form from start to finish.

As is common with these NFL spots, clean-up was abundant, from unlicensed signage to t-shirt logo removal to all that subjective stuff that makes shots look better. There was a fair share of plate retiming, and the subsequent paint-work that comes with it, as well as greenscreen comps, split-screens, matte paintings, etc.

On my end, I also had the usual finishing tasks that come with social deliverables, including alternate edits, subtitling, supers, color corrections, shot repos, and pan-and-scan treatments for various aspect ratios, all specific to the given delivery formats.

Full Credits

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Super Bowl 2019 | NFL: “The 100 Year Game”

SUPER BOWL COMMERCIAL
ROLE: Lead Flame Artist / VFX Compositor
VENDOR: The Mill
AGENCY: 72andSunny
PRODUCTION CO: Film 47
DIRECTOR: Peter Berg

How many NFL stars can fit into one two minute commercial? Apparently, all of them. At least, it seemed that way at the time. Short turnaround spot with lots of random nit picky clean up notes. A few hair and head transplants to mask the stunt doubles. And lots of carpet grooming. What else would you expect from a Super Bowl spot?

Full Credits

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Coors Banquet: “How It’s Done: Water”

COMMERCIAL
ROLE: Senior Flame Artist / VFX Compositor
VENDOR: The Mission
AGENCY: 72andSunny

This Coors Banquet spot is part of a thematic series, narrated by Sam Ellliot, all based on its historical Colorado Rocky Mountain roots. Honestly, these spots, including this one in particular, looked pretty straightforward at the outset. They’re weren’t.

I worked on most of the shots in “Water.” Most of it’s clean-up and product beauty. But the scrutiny was extreme. The opening shot of the bottle needed reframing, with no clean plates to help out. So all of that flowing, splashing water had to be rebuilt. The bottle label needed to be replaced, the glass misted and speckled with droplets, etc.

Same goes for the end shot. The timing of the bottle slide needed reworking, which required background clean-up, the slide had to be steadied and smoothed, and the bar background ultimately had to be replaced. All intensive, time consuming tasks, especially considering the amount of back and forth that went into it.

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Samsung Curved TV: “Changes Everything”

COMMERCIAL
ROLE: Senior Flame Artist / VFX Compositor
VENDOR: The Mission
AGENCY: 72andSunny
DIRECTOR: Rian Johnson

“Last Jedi” and “Looper” director Rian Johnson crafts this clever homage to memorable motion picture moments for the debut of Samsung’s Curved TV.

I still enjoy watching this spot today. Each clip is perfectly curated to tell this somewhat magical narrative. It has that spirit of 80s blockbuster summer films, even though it pulls from old and new alike.

My one memory, while working on the many screen comps, clean-ups, and product beauty, was watching Samsung not even flinch, when George Clooney asked for a million dollars to use a clip from “Gravity,” which had a whopping 8 words (not lines) of dialogue.

Anyway, my other takeaway was that curved screens are a bitch to track and comp in 2D. I also assembled the CG endtag of the curved TV.

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Samsung: “Amazing Things Happen: You Need to See This”

LONG-FORM COMMERCIAL
ROLE: Lead Flame Artist / VFX Compositor
VENDOR: The Mission
AGENCY: 72andSunny
DIRECTOR: James Mangold

I don’t recall a whole heck of a lot about this spot, except having 3-4 days to conform and finish it, so it could air in time for the Oscars. I also recall there being a snafu with the watch geometry supplied by Samsung, which created a few degrees of stress.

As per the norm for these Samsung spots, I handled screen comps, general shot clean-up, and the CG end card, which used to be twice as long and far more graceful in an earlier rendition. For some reason, it got cut down in the final. Also, there was endless discussion to the layout of all these devices and how much they should each be silhouetted.

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Samsung Galaxy: “LeBron Dunk” | “Pencil”

Samsung Galaxy Note 3: “LeBron Dunk”

Samsung Galaxy Tab Pro 10.1: “Pencil”

COMMERCIAL
ROLE: Senior Flame Artist / VFX Compositor
VENDOR: The Mill
AGENCY: 72andSunny

I clearly recall these two spots being a total pain in the ass. Both were focused on Samsung’s Galaxy family of mobile devices, the former “LeBron Dunk” on the Note 3, and the latter “Pencil” on the Galaxy Tab Pro 10.1. And both were poking fun at their main competitor Apple, and their mobile equivalents.

That brings me to “LeBron Dunk.” This was challenging for two reasons. The footage couldn’t be digitally altered in any way, since this was a comparison between the two screen displays. That proved difficult, when addressing content revisions, because both screens had to be reshot side-by-side, on their respective devices, under the same lighting conditions, to uphold the validity of the comparison. And there were a lot of revisions.

I worked on all the wide side-by-sides, as well as the endcard, which featured the only CG element. I also contributed concept work to deciphering the look of the background environment, which admittedly doesn’t look like much. But it took a lot of back and forth to arrive at the given dark nebulous space that appears in the spot.

“Pencil” had similar background challenges. Again, this spot was shot all in-camera. But finding the correct lighting and depth cues to reveal each device had to be refined in post. And the right shade of darkness on the background surface helped determine that.

I contributed the opening reveal, the side-by-side screen comparison, which also had the same complexities as “LeBron Dunk,” and the endcard, which again featured the only CG element.

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Samsung Galaxy Family: “Home Olympics”

COMMERCIAL
ROLE: Lead Flame Artist / VFX Compositor
VENDOR: The Mission
AGENCY: 72andSunny

If memory serves, this was one of the easier Samsung spots to work on. It was still a minute long. And the schedule was under a week. But the workload was fairly straightforward. In other words, this was primarily a conform and clean-up job, with a lot screen comps, and a fancy CG endcard. Plus, there was a team of 6 Flame Artists.

I did a handful of screen comps, removed some logos from a snowboard for the downhill rooftop sequence, changed the time of day for the bathtub bobsled ride, and spent the remainder of the schedule crafting the triple product endcard.

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Samsung Galaxy Gear: “Santa’s Secret”

COMMERCIAL
ROLE: Senior Flame Artist / VFX Compositor
VENDOR: The Mission
AGENCY: 72andSunny

A humorous take on the holidays, Santa is in full Steve Jobs mode for this press conference parody product reveal of the new Samsung smart watch / mobile device.

The bulk of the work centered on the screen comps, the primary one being the motion picture-sized one behind St. Nick and his elf helper. There was a team of six, so those were split evenly. The main challenge was generating the content itself, which was created in After Effects and Flame, depending on complexity and timing.

Flame also contributed some subtle particle systems to emulate snow falling from the top of the stage.

And I handled the CG endcard, featuring four phones, a stylus, and a watch. When these endcards feature more than one product, the number of iterations can get out of hand. This one was no different.

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Samsung Galaxy: “Meet the Note 3”

COMMERCIAL
ROLE: Senior Flame Artist / VFX Compositor
VENDOR: The Mission
AGENCY: 72andSunny

Fairly straightforward yet elegant tabletop product spot for Samsung’s latest (at the time) Note 3 mobile device. This one involved the typical product beauty and rig removal for the phone.

Also, since the Note 3 was still in production at the time of our production, some of the screen content and functionality had to be built through 2D graphics and animation, and thus tracked back into the given shots. Some of that was handled in After Effects, some in Flame. I worked on the stylus functionality shots, as well as the watch.

Lastly, I built the endcard out of multiple plates to ensure proper timing and smoothness of product spin.

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Samsung: “LeBron Always On”

LONG-FORM COMMERCIAL
ROLE: Senior Flame Artist / VFX Compositor
VENDOR: The Mission
AGENCY: 72andSunny
PRODUCTION CO: Park Pictures
DIRECTOR: Lance Accord

This is the longest Samsung spot I worked on, during my permalancer days at the Mission. It’s mostly a found footage celebration of then-product sponsor LeBron James, with some original shots peppered throughout, and the requisite endtag product shot.

Being found footage, there was a fair share of cleanup, particularly in the NBA game footage, but also in background signage and product logos. Also, there was a fair amount of screen comps throughout … phones, tablets, flat screens, etc. I was one of six that handled the workload.

Lastly, as was now my M.O., I tackled the endcard, this round being assembled from turntable footage that needed to be rebuilt in 2D to accommodate agency preference. Screen comps, clean-up, glints and glimmers, and a new background space.

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