Post and VFX work from New York’s Artjail offers perfect support to Heat‘s elevated copywriting and the meticulous high-speed footage shot by Park Pictures director Terri Timely in this new :45 for Dolby’s Atmos surround sound technology.

Artjail founder/CD Steve Mottershead: “Originally the team worked out an approach that utilized a combination of in-camera and CGI. The directors shot the baseball breaking through the window using a phantom camera which played as the base for all of the shots.

“In Nuke and Flame, we added extra CG shards of glass as well as finer glass dust particles to enhance the look. The most complex shot we had to handle was the one that the camera travels through the frozen moment shards.

“Again this was a combination of in-camera shards that Terri Timely hung from wire rigs that we removed using Nuke by way of 3D camera tracking and projecting clean painted frames back into the shot. From there we modeled, lit, and textured CG glass shards and comped them into the scene also using Nuke.

“One issue we ran into was that a few of the scenes needed to be slowed down even more than the high frame rate they were shot at which caused a lot of artifacts and also resulted in the baseball looking like it had too much motion blur for the speed that the shot was now playing back at. So for those scenes, we had to paint out the artifacts and in a few cases had to completely replace the baseball with a CG ball.

“The last thing we handled VFX-wise was a few matte paintings that are visible out the windows of the room. We also handled the grade, that was done remotely in San Francisco using Davinci.”

Agency: Heat
Production: Park Pictures
Director: Terri Timely
Post/VFX: Artjail
Creative Director: Steve Mottershead
Head of Production: John Skeffington
CG: James Williams and Jimmy San
Compositing: Ben Vaccaro and Chris Gereg
Color: Shawn King