Client: Astro
Agency: Wizards Room
Production House: Chilli Pepper Films
Production Exec. Producer: Mohd Effendy Harjoh & Ahmad Mubin Rasydan
Director: Steven Ang
Assistant Director: Fabian Joseph
Agency: Wizards Room
Production House: Chilli Pepper Films
Production Exec. Producer: Mohd Effendy Harjoh & Ahmad Mubin Rasydan
Director: Steven Ang
Assistant Director: Fabian Joseph
The World Cup is back!
To celebrate the most anticipated sports event of the year, Astro Sdn Bhd has come up with a promo to announce their exclusive airing of all 64 matches live in HD. Working with director, Steven Ang, and Agency, Wizards Room, we were taken in for a thrilling ride in completing one of the most exciting job of the year. One that we were involved from the very beginning till the promo went out on air.
Sketches done to get a rough idea on how the animation would be like.
More sketches to get ideas across from Steven to us.
A lot of research was done during the preliminary stages especially on getting dynamic angles of the footballers to blend in with the style we were going for. Steven wanted to play around with double exposures that show footages during a football match and scenic views of countries that were participating in the World Cup. To tie with the World Cup Promos that Astro Sdn Bhd already has, we were asked to incorporate paint to the video to show the burst of lively colours during the World Cup.
One of our biggest challenge was creating the paint texture that Steven had envisioned for the commercial. Never dealing with paint before, we set out on a mission to find the best way on getting a rich paint texture with interesting patterns to entice the viewers after locking down the styleframes.
Completed styleframes that were compiled for a shootboard.
Bottles and tubes of paint for our experimental paint production.
Paint shoot was done in-house, hence our very own designer-cum-director hard at work.
Our paint production setup.
As to make the football action as real as possible, production was shot at a indoor paintball/futsal court instead of a production studio. Everyone was buzzing with excitement during shoot since the production team has decided to use the Phantom camera to capture all the great football movements in slow motion. The Phantom was flown down from Thailand specifically for this job.
Steven surrounded by all the post people involved, making sure we were all on the same page.
It’s a great thing to see actions in slow-motion.
We soon found out during shoot that although a Phantom can shoot up to 2000+ fps for HD size, a lot of lights were needed to light up the scene. So the higher fps you go, the more lights you need and that became a challenge for us, seeing that we needed a great deal of light to get a nice smooth green matte for the keyouts later during post-production.
Setup for the Phantom.
Light concentrated at the shoot area. We might have used up all the electricity supplied.
Another setup for the running scenes.
13 done and lots more to go. At least Steven, Fabian & Siva are still in a cheerful mood.
Nam, a world champion in freestyle football, giving us what he’s best in: a very angry intense face.
5 people to handle one Phantom, plus one curious football talent.
This was our first time collaborating with another post house to finish the job, so there was a challenge in making sure everything were at the same standard as needed. All design work, cleanups and key outs were done within a span of 2 weeks, so we had to make sure that everything was on point before final delivery. We also had to keep in mind that the paint never overshadows the football action which was what the Promo was intended to do.
Raw footage of one of the shots.
Final outcome for the shot. Paint, double exposure and key out details are in to make the picture look as one.
Our first WIP of the opening scene.
Final outcome of the shot. We decided to put him in a greyish stadium instead of him alone before the excitement starts.
One of our main challenge was for the end stadium shot where the paint bursts out to reveal the logo. We couldn’t find a Brazilian stadium footage that fits for the promo, so we were asked to make magic by making a daylight picture to a day-to-night-video. Fireworks were also needed to bring the festive celebration alive in the shot.
The most post heavy shot of the promo.
Overall it was a fine and exciting experience to those that were involved, and we’re grateful to everyone who we’ve worked with in this project. To end it all, here is a Behind the Scenes video of the Astro World Cup 2014 Promo. Enjoy.
