This commercial celebrates the new Stratosphere hotel in Sin City...Las Vegas. The hotel, casino and tower have been renovated and re-imagined. Our character "Speedy" is an animated arrow that zips through all of the new spaces the property has to offer.
Click on the BEHIND THE SCENES bar below for a look at the making of this spot.
This was an incredibly challenging shoot. Shooting at casino’s always is. There is an added layer of security logistics in every move and set-up because we are around huge amounts of money. We shot this spot in 2 days and the limitations of the property made it impossible for us to do any sort of pre-light on any set up.
We crammed 19 different complicated set-ups chock full of visual effects in a 30 second spot. And the only way we were able to get it done was with the amazing crew I was fortunate enough to work with. Aside from the usual suspects at Big Machine, I owe a huge debt of gratitude to my good friend Amanda for helping me find the best local crew positions that Vegas had to offer.
For each of our 19 set-ups we had “speedy”, our animated arrow character, in just about every one. To make sure “speedy” had the exact lighting on his CG body that the environment around him did, we shot HDRI lighting reference maps in each individual set up. This helped compositing immensely. Here you can see our HDRI globe in scene. In this shot you can also see we green-screened in the shot of the Vegas strip outside the window.
This is a shot of me arranging the blocking of the scene at the TOW (Top of the World) restaurant. We used TOW to double for Lounge 107. It provided a much better angle of the strip below. We wanted the shot to go off right at ‘magic hour’ sunset. So we were exposing our interior lights to match the exposure we calculated outside sunset would provide. This was your typical mad dash for that 10 minutes of beautiful golden-hour light. The best compliment I have gotten is that some people thought we comp’d in the background in this shot because it looks so fake and picture-esque… but it was all shot practically! (this snap shot was taken about an hour before sunset while we were working out the camera angle and blocking so you’ll have to check out the final spot to see the effect we captured outside the window)
This is a shot of part of the set up we had for Shot 2: “Speedy” entering the casino. Justin, our steadicam op, started on a platform we built for him to come in high and dutched as the doorman opened the door. Over on the left you can see Jeremy, our AD, holding a scale arrow I had the Art Department build. I would shoot the mock-up arrow moving through each scene so the animators could see a reference of how the real world lights of the set actually interacted with the surface of the arrow.
