limits of telecine transfer

If necessity is the mother of invention, probably no factor more than a spandex-tight budget serves as the impetus for many creative innovations in the post industry.

A recent television commercial entitled ‘Juicy Secrets’ for B.C. Hothouse Tomatoes, produced by Circle Productions and posted at Vancouver’s Post Haste Video, with additional special-effect morphing performed at Northwest Imaging and FX, illustrates the point.

Directed by Vancouver tabletop specialist Derik Murray, ‘Juicy Secrets’ begins with a close-up of an old-fashioned radio, then the camera pulls back and pans across the kitchen to the open window where we see one red and one green tomato against the backdrop of a bright blue sky. The camera zooms in on the tomatoes. The red tomato, through a morphing technique, begins to gesture as if putting the moves on or making a lewd remark to the green tomato. At this point, the green tomato begins to blush red and it’s leafy stem pops off as the graphics, ‘Juicy Secrets, B.C. Hothouse Tomatoes,’ appear on-screen.

To achieve this seemingly simple effect, director Murray filmed the entire sequence in reverse with both tomatoes red throughout. The reasoning, says Doug Jeffrey, Post Haste’s director of operations, was to have the tomatoes isolated and static. ‘If you’re going to work with a still frame you don’t want to have to match it to the end of a camera move so that there are no bumps or jumps.’ The red tomato was then changed into a green tomato at the film transfer stage.

Gary Shaw, vice-president of marketing at Post Haste, one of Vancouver’s largest full-service post houses, explains: ‘Primarily our mandate was to add some life and characterization to the tomatoes but still make them look like tomatoes – not animated or cartoonish – while also staying within a very tight budget.’

Adds Jeffrey: ‘The creative concept for the commercial evolved as a result of what we could offer in post-production. We quickly realized that the budget available was not sufficient to do what the client wanted, but they were willing to experiment. So in conjunction with Northwest Imaging, which handled the special effects morphing, we decided to take on the project because we all thought it would be an interesting challenge.’

Shaw says to achieve this type and quality of effects in normal circumstances, animation would have been the answer. But in this case it would have cost the client between $20,000 and $30,000 in animation alone just to generate the two tomatoes. So they decided to use the telecine transfer technique, which costs much less and produces natural looking images and an end product every bit as interesting.

Shaw says Post Haste’s reputation for developing innovative applications of technology is due in large part to its involvement in music videos. Most music videos, he says, ‘have a minuscule budget but always a lot of very creative ideas, and we have to find ways of accommodating both elements.’

Jeffrey says prior to Post Haste’s $2 million equipment and facility expansion into component digital technology, the ‘Juicy Secrets’ transfer technique would not have been possible because the post house could not have isolated sections of the screen so perfectly.

Included in the upgrades are a new component digital on-line edit suite, a digital scanner and color corrector as well as four new digital Betacam machines.

With the new technology, Jeffrey says ‘we were able to achieve something that previously would have had to be done via extensive graphic and compositing work prior to the on-line editing. The addition of Power Windows software on the new Renaissance digital color corrector meant we were able to achieve the soft edge and rounded matte that we needed to change the color of the tomato. And by using the telecine transfer technique, we were able to do this work at the film transfer stage, and for us as a post house, push back the limits of our film transfer equipment.’