Naturalism may be at the core of the new Ammirati Puris Lintas Labatt Blue Light campaign, but the ads’ tag image provides a striking trick effect accomplished by William Cameron of Toronto design and animation house GAMMA Studios and Mike Morey from dave.

The spots end in classic Labatt Blue/Blue Light fashion, with a camera tilt up to a blue sky. (The camera move was actually not performed on location, but digitally introduced in post.) A flash follows the tilt, and then a Blue Light bottle seems to fall ‘into’ the sky, at which point we realize we are looking at a reflection of the sky in a pool of water.

The effect contains both filmed and cg elements. ‘[The crew] shot a real bottle falling into a dark blue watery tank,’ Cameron explains. Rolling at 250 frames per second helped produce some beautiful high-speed splashing, but the bottle sunk, whereas the filmmakers preferred a bobbing motion.

According to Cameron, the production was then faced with two options: ‘Either keep that film element bottle and use a still of it to have it ‘float’ to the water, or construct an entirely virtual bottle.’ The latter solution was chosen since it offered more control over the look of the label, of which there needed to be two versions – oval-shaped for Canada, and rectangular for the u.s.

Keeping the filmed bottle-falling motion, Cameron constructed cg labels and bottles (separate u.s. and Canadian models as well) using Discreet’s 3D Studio max animation package and a prerelease copy of the Mental Ray 3D renderer.

‘It came down to heavy-duty rendering to get it looking like a real bottle in all that beautiful product shot glory, with little beads of sweat on the bottle and the shiny foil reflectivity of the label,’ Cameron says.

Inferno compositor Morey took the film element that breaks and ripples the reflection of the sky and wove it seamlessly with the filmed splashing. Cameron achieved the sensation of the cg bottle bobbing in the water as a white surface animation, which he then forwarded to Morey as a matte element.

Morey enhanced the effect by adding displacement and rippling effects to the water at the bottle’s edges.

‘Mike did a great job of integrating everything together,’ Cameron says.

Cameron believes the results add a dreamlike quality to the otherwise down-to-earth spots, noting, ‘There’s definitely something surreal about the effect.’