"Costs More than the Space Shuttle?" Not Quite, but Worth It
ESPN kicked off its 3D telecasts earlier this summer with its coverage of the World Cup games in South Africa. To mark the achievement, the SportsCenter campaign went 3D -- with comic results.
Recounting Wieden + Kennedy’s Path to 3D Comedy for SportsCenter
ESPN kicked off its 3D telecasts earlier this summer with its coverage of the World Cup games in South Africa. To make the occasion, theSportsCenter campaign went 3D -- with comic results.
By Anthony Vagnoni
When ESPN kicked off its 3D coverage of the World Cup earlier this year, all of the ads presented as part of the programming were shown in 3D. This included work for Sony, which is ESPN’s partner on the venture, as well as Disney/Pixar, which ran promos for its "Toy Story 3" feature, and Gillette, which ran a spot for the Fusion razor. (Soon joining the mix will be Bud Light, which will run 3D ads on college football coverage.)
But no ESPN telecast is complete without a promo for the network, particularly a spot from it's long-running "This is SportsCenter" comedy campaign that has ESPN on-air talent interacting on an everyday basis with pro athletes, typically seen in uniform.
Wieden + Kennedy New York, the ESPN agency, was tasked to produce the network’s first TV spot for SportsCenter in 3D. Not surprisingly, it turned out to be the agency’s first foray into 3D production as well.
SourceEcreative recently spoke with the agency’s Head of Production, Gary Krieg, and the Joint Editorial post producer on the spot, Sasha Hirschfeld, about the process.
In the spot, “If you Break It, You Buy It,” anchor Stan Verrett is showing L.A. Dodgers heartthrob outfielder Andre Ethier around the studio and shows him the new 3D camera. “It’s awesome,” he says. He takes the bat Ethier is holding and invites the player to step behind the camera to check it out, while he gets in front of the camera with the bat in his hands. “Pretty cool, right?” he asks as he points the bat towards the lens. “This is amazing,” says Ethier, to which Verrett says, “This thing costs more than the space shuttle.”
Ethier then invites Verrett to take a major league swing, so he can see what it looks like. Only problem is that Verrett is standing too close to the camera and he wallops the end of the lens with the bat when he takes his cut. The sound of breaking glass echoes through the studio while the two of them look on in shock. The spot ends with an image of the two of them peering into the lens—which now appears shattered, thanks to 3D VFX from Suspect in New York—as Ethier ask, “Are we going to get in trouble for this?” Verrett answers, “Yes.”
The spot was directed by O Positive’s David Shane, who’s been shooting most if not all of the SportsCenter spots for the past few years, Krieg explains. The choice of the director here was on purpose, he adds.
“We wanted to keep the same look and feel, to keep the campaign consistent,” he says. “The spot needed to feel like a SportsCenter spot. The technology couldn’t get in the way of the comedy.”
Krieg said that given all variables on this job—the agency’s first 3D effort, for example, and working with a post house that they had not worked with before but that was chosen for its 3D experience—he wanted to keep as many things consistent with previous SportsCenter productions as possible.
The production of this job was also broken down into two phases, handled by two producers, he added. Krieg oversaw production of the live action portion of the shoot, then turned the job over to Hirschfeld at Joint Editorial, the in-house editing facility at the agency.
Hirschfeld was tasked with researching the options for handling 3D post and VFX work on the spot. She spent a considerable amount of time tracking down various resources for the agency, most of which were on the West Coast.
For a variety of reasons, mostly due to logistics, the agency wanted to try and keep the post on the spot on the East Coast, so that both agency and client exec could check in on the process and view edits and effects in 3D. That search led Hirschfeld to PostWorks, a New York post house that has worked in 3D on a variety of projects. Finding companies with 3D experience is more difficult in New York, she pointed out—for that matter, finding companies anywhere that have handled a lot of 3D is a challenge.
Hirschfeld says that prior to awarding the post to PostWorks, the agency did quite a bit of research beforehand, speaking to six different post companies, from which they got six different versions of how to do it, with lots of conflicting information. “Everyone is learning this at the same time. On top of that, most places that have done 3D have only done a few projects at most, so it’s hard to find vendors with a huge wealth of knowledge.
“It was a bit of mystery to us when we started, and it still is,” she continues. “There are a lot of places where things can go wrong, because there are two cameras. But it’s less of a mystery now. I thought it was going to feel like reinventing the wheel, but it’s not. It’s more like tweaking the wheel, mostly with workflows and doing things differently. In part, because there wasn't a huge amount of graphics work on this spot, it wasn’t nearly as much of a brave new world as I thought it would be.”
In terms of working with the post house, Hirschfeld says it went well. “We worked in tandem with them at each point of the edit,” she says of PostWorks. “We really partnered with them intimately, even working out of their offices while doing the offline. Every part of the job was a close collaboration between us and them.”
Hirschfeld says she thought the difference in cost was not out of line with what they had expected—not nearly as expensive as the space shuttle, for example—nor did the post process on the job take a long as she thought. “You need extra time to process two streams of data, not one, and you need more time for color correction,” she says. One of the major elements of the post process that was different was the placement of onscreen graphics, she adds. “They’re harder to place within the frame. Getting them right stereoscopically is very difficult.”
And what did she think of the overall results? “Seeing the spot in 3D was just so cool,” she says enthusiastically. “To see how the content changed was so exciting. It was a great experience, but also a huge learning curve—dealing things like stereography, for example, which is the determination of how things fit in space.”
In addition to Krieg the W+K team included Cyrus Coulter, Brandon Henderson, Stuart Jennings, Luke Behrends, Jerome Austria and Kevin Proudfoot. Temma Shoaf was the agency producer on the shoot, and Kelly Dage produced the post for the agency. Executive Producers at O Positive were Ralph Laucella and Marc Grill. DP on the job was David Morabito, with 3D cinematography by Brian Garbellini. Audio post was handled by Benny Mouthon at PostWorks, and the colorist there was Eli Friedman. The spot was edited by Andrew Robertson at Joint Editorial. The VFX team at Suspect included John Geehreng and Raul Alejandro Garzon. Sound design was handled by Joseph Fraioli at JafBox Sound.
Published Sept. 7, 2010
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