VW Switzerland "Der Pfiff"
About the Project
A lot of different Shots had to be retouched and composited in this commercial. The biggest challenge was to roto out 100+ people to change a background. I had to do a lot of tracking for the replacement-composites of the license plates, the rims and the background-replacements of the car shots as well as cleaning the stadium seats and logos in the first shots.
Client: tausend Rosen Filmproduktion und Werbung GmbH
Product: VW
Agency: WWP Creative GmbH
Producer: Thomas Bogner
Director: Thomas Dirnhofer
DoP: Thomas Dirnhofer, Martin Bauer
Postproduction: Jürgen Rabatscher, Works Film Studio
Agency: WWP Creative GmbH
Producer: Thomas Bogner
Director: Thomas Dirnhofer
DoP: Thomas Dirnhofer, Martin Bauer
Postproduction: Jürgen Rabatscher, Works Film Studio
Cleaning the stadium
A lot of photoshop work had to be done before the actual compositing could start. The backplate in the pictures above is a photograph which I edited to get rid of all the logos and brandings in the stadium. For the camera movement I told the crew to film a handheld move so that I could track the movement out of the real shaky footage. It's always better to work from the real deal than from a coded wiggle.
The hardest part was the first shot which was actually filmed with heavy amounts of motion blur. I had to 3D-track this blurry mess and also replace all the logos from it. The seats were almost impossible to replace!
Cleaning the streets
This shot starts in a blur and zooms onto the street filled with people, cars, a construction site and several road signs. I had to remove all that and add in more people instead. This happens to be one of my favourite composites because of all the different techniques used to achieve it.
First I tracked the footage and searched for a good frame with no motion blur to edit from. Once found I opened it up in photoshop and edited out all the unwanted stuff, brought it back into After Affects and linked it to the track. We filmed more than one crowd walking down the street so I took another footage, stabilized it and masked out the crowd. Then I had to roto out the people and link it to the track again, add the motion blur back in and watch out for the camera movement and blur in the beginning.
Changing a tire
The client was not happy with the wheels on the vehicle so they asked me to change them on the moving car. Actually from here on out I had to change every wheel on every Tiguan in this commercial. At first the idea was to model, track and animate it in 3D but I found that it would be much easier and cheaper to just film the real thing on a real car and match the perspective. This made life a lot easier. We filmed the wheels from different perspectives and I masked out the rims, linked them to the track of the car and adjusted them slightly in perspective. That's about it.
Switching the location
This scene was filmed in front of a particular stadium which should not be identified as such so the producers told me to change it to another one. Well, this one was no easy task as I had to rotoscope all the people in order to change the background. Not particularly fun as the people were waving with flags but in the end the outcome was very satisfying. I got the new background from several photographs which I stitched together to match the perspective. Also in this shot I replaced the wheels and the display over the entrance and as in every other shot I also changed the license plates.
