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Monday, 17 September 2007 | Levent OZLER
Brickyard VFX Completes Latest Sprint Spot
 Light Trail.mov ( 4MB ) - Viewed 178 times
Artist owned-and-operated effects boutique Brickyard VFX completed work on another spot project for Sprint. The ad, "Light Trail," uses a similar light-painting motif featured in the current broadcast, print and outdoor campaign for Sprint via Goody, Silverstein & Partners, San Francisco. The spot began airing on September 17, 2006 and was directed by the Snorri Bros via production company Smuggler.
Following a trail of light through dimly lit time-lapse tableaus, the viewer hops onto a bus, then travels down a flight of stairs, through an outdoor café and past a busy promenade of shops with passers by and a fire-breathing street performer. The light trail continues up the side of a skyscraper and into a corporate board room where it artfully bounces across the conference table, exits the building and crosses the street to the front of a movie theatre where the light beams into the mobile phone of a woman receiving a call. The voiceover plays over the final sequence, "getting the signal you want at the speed of light, that's Sprint speed."
The spot closes with 22 different end tags, each tailored with an evening time-lapse view of the specific city in which the spot is being broadcast.
Brickyard VFX effects artist Mandy Sorenson participated on location in Vancouver to supervise the spot VFX. While all the light trails were shot in camera, extensive cleanup and compositing was required to give the commercial a polished look. The light trail effect was achieved by having a person dressed in all black run the flashlight through shots that were filmed with really long exposures. Brickyard's work involved painting out the individuals driving the light trails in select shots, compositing multiple layers in several of the scenes, as well as shooting time-lapsed photography of Phoenix and San Bernardino for the regional end-tags.
"The directors did a great job with the R&D on "Light Trail", and achieving the bulk of this spot's effects in camera," commented Mandy Sorenson, VFX Artist, Brickyard VFX. "The biggest challenge on this project was achieving a believable animation of the people in the scenes in a subtle but convincing way, and compositing scenes with people interacting with the light."
Located in Boston and Santa Monica, Brickyard VFX is an independent visual effects boutique specializing in top quality visual effects from 3D characters through to compositing. Completely artist owned and operated, the company was founded in 1999 to bring clients a level of customer service, craftsmanship and focus difficult to find at facilities today. Brickyard's problem-solving expertise on set and in the studio has been applied to model, animate, light, texture, track, color correct and render seamless digital effects for XM Radio, Citibank, Volkswagen, Honda, Tyson Foods and many other accounts.
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