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Celebrate the "Bullitt"
By Katie Makal
Dec 3, 2004, 22:30
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R!OT Santa Monica and POP Sound helped put Steve McQueen back behind the wheel of a Mustang in a new television and theatrical spot for Ford and Detroit agency J. Walter Thompson. R!OT supplied the visual effects magic necessary to place the late actor's likeness, drawn from the 1968 action film Bullitt, into a modern day scenario involving the 2005 version of the classic Ford car.
The spot was directed by Paul Street of Believe Media. A body double was used for scenes depicting McQueen from the back, while frontal views and close-ups of the actor's face were lifted from Bullitt and placed into the modern scenes by the visual effects team at R!OT.
R!OT's team was headed by Visual Effects Artist Verdi Sevenhuysen, who became involved in the project during pre-production. Working with Street and FilmCore editor Nicholas Wayman-Harris, he helped to put together a test version of the spot using clips from Bullitt and digital video footage shot by Street with stand-ins. "The test spot became the template for the actual production," Sevenhuysen explains. "It enabled us to determine which scenes from the movie could work as composites and gave us a sense of continuity as far as motion and lighting were concerned."
A key consideration for the shoot was to match the look of the scenes from Bullitt as closely as possible to aid postproduction integration. "Paul used the same lenses that Bill Fraker used on the film and tried to match the stock as well," Sevenhuysen says. "I had a long chat with Paul and his DP, Garry Waller, and we decided to pre-flash the film to get a similar look."
R!OT colorists Clark Muller and Adolfo Martinelli transferred Street's location footage to HD 10-bit video as the initial color reference and optimized flat passes. "Warner Bros. didn't want to release all the original Bullitt rolls to us, so we did the HD transfer from an IP to D5," recalls Sevenhuysen. "The footage was transferred as optimized flat passes, rather than going to final color to maintain maximum latitude to work with in the compositing stage. We transferred all of the negative at full frame--4:3 aspect ratio--so that we retained parts of the imagery that had been cropped for the Bullitt feature. We could see light rigging at the top of frame, which gave us more of a clue about how they lit the scene."
The final color re-grade of the composited picture was completed by Sevenhuysen using lustre, a tool from Discreet that allowed him to apply all of the mattes generated in the inferno for separate color grades on the car, sky, road, cornfield, talent and other details.
"The close-up shots were the least forgiving as we spend a long time on them, and there is little movement," says Sevenhuysen. "The moment when McQueen walks toward the camera was the most difficult shot to integrate due to lighting and background continuity."
All of the post work at R!OT was completed in HD. The studio ultimately prepared an HD D5 master of the finished spot that was then used to produce all of the required deliverables, including NTSC versions for television broadcast and a :60 theatrical version.
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