The camera pans a packed stadium from above – and the crowd goes wild. Is this the kind of shot you can reasonably expect a spot budget to stretch to? Andrew Schulze, manager of broadcast product at Palmer Jarvis ddb, charged with securing footage like this for the recent Budweiser Budbowl campaign, found getting a shot like this from a stock source considerably easier than shooting the real thing from scratch. Not that he wanted anyone watching to know that.

‘We were looking to create very seamlessly the illusion that it was all created for that spot. That’s the goal: to create a great illusion within budget,’ says Schulze.

The campaign, planned to run against the Olympics, spoofed recognizable Olympic events by flooding predictable scenarios with nfl players.

‘There would be an Olympic event and these footballers would come in and bring it back down – the idea was the real game is football,’ Schulze explains.

Cost was not the only pivotal factor, the lack of suitable facilities – apart from Montreal’s Olympic Stadium, deemed too recognizable – also came into play. ‘The cost of trying to simulate or reproduce a stadium from overhead – it would cost huge amounts of money and in this country we don’t have the stadium that would allow us to shoot that,’ says Schulze.

‘If we were stacking thousands in the audience it would be incredibly expensive to do, versus stock footage where it already exists and there’s no reason to redo it. We went after a stadium that could be Sydney. There was no way we could simulate that without hundreds and thousands of dollars and get as good a shot as we could get going through the libraries in North America and Europe.’

With the option of shooting a stadium full of people out of the question, the search was on. ‘We did a huge search of footage to get something more authentic than what we could begin to simulate. We ended up using 12 stock shots over five spots – stuff to make the event seem more real than it was. We worked it into the story so it looked seamless – crowd shots and stadium shots.

‘We were very specific in what we were searching for; it had to simulate broadcast tv material, video or come from an actual tv broadcast.’

The whole process of tracking down the footage took about a month, starting with a research campaign in North America and Europe. Rather than collecting screeners from stock shops, exploration of the Web was the first step.

‘The big facilities have very sophisticated websites where you can do a quick search on your own and when you find the range you’re looking for, you give them a call and get something much more specific.’

In some instances, the more refined stage of searching was taken care of via password-accessible Internet pages, before footage was made available on three-quarter or half-inch tape ‘so the editor and director can look at it as well.’

Schulze says the Internet has sped the process up considerably ‘in the last year.’

‘When you’re sitting around chatting about creative ideas you can actually turn around and start searching to see if it exists or if something close to it exists. It cuts out a lot of time.

‘There’s so much out there now you could get virtually anything.’

The fifth ad in the campaign (not Olympic-flavored this time) goes to air as a refresher in January. *

-www.palmerjarvisddb.com