TV Commercial with some special effects!

This is a commercial I shot and edited for adworkshop.  The client was Canton Potsdam Hospital.  It was a fun one to work on. I was going to be shooting it and doing the editing.  There was some special effects for this one, beyond what we normally do, so I did some test shots in my yard with my son to figure out how to do it.  We wanted a jogger to be jogging in slow motion while everyone else was running full speed.  At first we thought having him run against a green screen would work, then we could composite him in and then slow down the footage, but then the realities of painting a treadmill chroma key green and how realistic it would look began to sink in! Plus the shot he was to go against would have to moving at his slo mo speed, meaning a dolly or truck shot.  To avoid this he needed to be coming directly at the camera.

After some test shots, I figured out that if the camera is stationary, then you can shoot multiple passes and then just mask out certain things (the guy jogging) and it would all look seamless.  With the camera locked off on the ground level shot, we had the guy jog towards us, I shot this in overcrank mode (60 FPS instead of the usual 30FPS), so the slo mo would look better/smoother after when played back at 30FPS.  Then once he ran by, we positioned the other runners to run on each side of where he was, when it came time to edit, I masked out a box around him and put it over the background runners shot!  Since the camera didn’t move, it looked seamless!  For the next shot to freeze him, I took a freeze frame, cut out around him (And his shadow!) and put that over the same composition of others running by, again, don’t move the camera and it’ll work!  What really sells it is the foreground runners, which I shot over a chromakey on location.  Just frame up the chroma key in bright sun, then have some runners run through the shot!  The blur is perfect, and all you need to do is composite them on top of the other two layers!

Check it out below!