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Posted on 02/05/26 2:00:06 PM |
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DavidMac
Director of Photoshop Posts: 6193 Reply  |
AN OFF TOPIC THAT'S NONETHELESS WHAT MANY OF US DO HERE ..................
Here at HTCP we are all image compositors and we have amongst us photographers, animators and a 3D expert. This post concerns all four of these disciplines. I am assuming that we all remember the name Grundig although I’m not how well known it was in the USA or down under. A couple of weeks ago, completely out of the blue, I was contacted by a man researching this: 
It is the Grundig Space Fidelity player. It used a special technology that allowed for superior ‘space filling’ stereo without additional speakers. He was trying to track down, not only the history of this oddball appliance, but also the original TV commercial used to launch and publicise it in 1995. No copies of it appeared to exist any longer. Hardly surprising. TV ads are not something normally preserved for posterity and Grundig itself as a functioning company had long since disappeared. Eventually his long and convoluted trail led to me as he had finally discovered through a hugely complicated chain of searches that I was the director and photographer who had made the spot thirty one years ago. He wanted any recollections I might have about the spot and its making. To be honest I had almost forgotten about it! But I went digging and discovered that, buried in my archives, I had what appears now to be the only surviving copy in existence! Sadly not the full high cinema resolution of the original but enough to give a good impression. So I am happy to say that it is now finding its way into the hands of some very happy people who were involved in the original development of this odd machine which is now a museum piece . So back to the spot. The advertising agency wanted a visual metaphor for the idea of the sound filling the space surrounding the player. They had come up with the idea of flying flames radiating out from the machine and this had already been accepted by Grundig. When they approached me to make the spot for them this concept was already fixed. My job would be to give that concept reality. Whilst today the spot no longer has the Wow! factor it did over thirty years ago, I think it has stood the test of time quite well. You must decide for yourselves. Here it is. So back to HTCP and its different members. Given your various differing skills and interest, some of you might be interested to hear about the making of this spot, as it involved, for 1995, some very advanced leading edge technical shooting and post production including animation and 3D. So, at this point, you can decide to dive into a rather long (but hopefully interesting) dissertation or drink a coffee or scotch on the rocks and move on ………….. ……………… It was clear from the start that we wanted to use a fluid moving camera to film the player, moving constantly around it. But we would need to add the moving flames to this later in post. The only way to do this was a technique, still in its absolute infancy, called motion control. In motion control the dolly and camera are driven by servo motors linked to a computer. Servo motors can be programmed to perform totally precise rotations and can also feed back their rotational position digitally. We used a camera dolly and jib combined called the Mark Roberts Milo which had been designed and built just one year previously specifically for motion control film use. 
This did two things. It could be programmed to produce complex camera moves that could be constantly refined with absolute precision until we had exactly what we needed. Once a move was established it could be exported to a floppy disc file defining the exact coordinates of the camera relative to subject at every frame during the move. This recording could be used in the post production process to create a virtual camera to precisely match the physical camera’s movements. This virtual camera would be used for the animated flames so as to place them correctly in 3D space relative to the live footage of the Grundig player. Because we needed to add animation, which is frame based, to the live material of the player we had to shoot this on film, as frame based digital video cameras did not yet exist. We shot on 35mm Eastman colour negative (125 ASA. 3200K colour balance) using an American made Mitchell Mk II camera dating from the 1960’s because it had a film transport of unrivalled precision which was necessary for the compositing to be absolutely stable and free of ’shake’. 
We started by using different burners to produce differently shaped flames which were filmed and presented to Grundig. They needed to look absolutely real but at the same time be how we imagine a clean and perfect flame to be. It was, after all, a symbol of the Grundig sound. Once a form was agreed upon we filmed a number of variations. Following this we planned and shot all the moves around the player. To do the post I chose a very talented young post production compositing artist Sean Broughton who had just set up his own company ‘Smoke and Mirrors’. He went on to become a hugely respected VFX supervisor and director. Sean was familiar with a brand new Silicon Graphics software called, appropriately, and entirely coincidentally, ‘Flame’. Flame was capable of manipulating 3D in a way that was still very new. By today’s standards it was pretty basic but back then it was ground breaking. When we went into post production we had all elements needed. The moves around the space fidelity player, the flames and the co-ordinates to create the virtual camera. And here we ran up against a huge problem. As the camera and flames move the viewpoint and perspective of the flames is constantly changing. This means they have to be rotated in 3D. Nowadays the flames would be created in 3D and this would be no problem, but back then this was not possible and here is the catch - our flames were not 3D they were 2D images we had photographed. To put it crudely they were photographed ‘face on’ - you can think of them as images on thin sheets of celluloid. As you rotate them in 3D they get progressively thinner until they are ‘edge on’ at which point they have zero thickness and disappear! To get around this we had to give the impression of 3D flames being seen from different viewpoints by perspective distortions of our 2D flames. Some of this was relatively straight forward automated keyframe animation but as the flames get close to camera this had to be done by hand and eye. It was hugely difficult and time consuming! Sean’s treatment of the large foreground flames sweeping past the lens are tribute to his remarkable skill and talent. On the big screen in the cinema they really 'hit' you. The main production of this spot took four weeks. The shooting of the flames and the player took (if I remember correctly) three days. The overall post production including scanning the original negative and laser printing the end result back onto film took over three weeks. Of this, three weeks were spent on the animation and compositing with Sean and I working closely together. It was so demanding in computer resources that Sean's engineer added a whole slew of extra memory cards hanging out of the back of his computer on ribbon cables! We take FX like this as ‘yeah so what’ nowadays but in the context of the technology available to us thirty years ago it was pretty mind bending! I am so pleased that a completely unexpected contact out of the blue has brought it all back! _________________ The subtlety and conviction of any Photoshop effect is invariably inversely proportional to the number of knobs on it ....... |
Posted on 02/05/26 3:44:20 PM |
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GKB
Magical Montagist Posts: 4154 Reply  |
Re: AN OFF TOPIC THAT'S NONETHELESS WHAT MANY OF US DO HERE ..................
For 1995 this is a very impressive piece of film. It was around this time that I started using Photoshop 4 which, impressive as it was, was still in its infancy. If I remember correctly it was the first version to have layers. Any 3D programme at the time was very rudimentary and enormously expensive. This makes the film even more impressive. When I watched it I could see that the flames were shot in 2D as some of them disappeared when they were edge-on. I can’t imagine spending so much time on this as, once you had one 3D flame created on a modern programme, it would be the work of minutes to clone the flame multiple times and add variations. Everything would be linked to a single virtual camera so you could create everything independently and then add any colour changes, blurring etc just like in Photoshop. _________________ Why is it that all the contestants in the ‘Miss Universe’ contest are all from Earth? |
Posted on 02/05/26 5:21:50 PM |
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DavidMac
Director of Photoshop Posts: 6193 Reply |
Re: AN OFF TOPIC THAT'S NONETHELESS WHAT MANY OF US DO HERE ..................
This is why I posted because I knew there were people here, like you, who would understand the implications when looked at in the context of the time. _________________ The subtlety and conviction of any Photoshop effect is invariably inversely proportional to the number of knobs on it ....... |
Posted on 03/05/26 10:52:50 PM |
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dwindt
Realism Realiser Posts: 1047 Reply |
Re: AN OFF TOPIC THAT'S NONETHELESS WHAT MANY OF US DO HERE ..................
This is phenomenal David. A very interesting post and a stunning display of utilizing the tools of the day, thinking out the box and nailing a wonderful display of genius. Well done. The researcher must be over the moon with delight. Wonderful that you not only archived it but was able to dig it up. Bully for you!!! _________________ The grass is greener on the other side of the fence because there is more $hit there. |