The Making of a High-Tech Ad
To sell this year's model, you can't use last year's commercial.
by Michael Rozek
From Atari Age magazine, volume 2, number 2
(Original article from Technology Illustrated magazine, 1983).
by Michael Rozek
From Atari Age magazine, volume 2, number 2
(Original article from Technology Illustrated magazine, 1983).
It begins like any television commercial: a simple film of real life. A designer of video games, played by actor Rod Davidson, sits in his office. He is swiveling in his chair, musing.
"I'll have a fly," he says suddenly, "a mutant fly." And with that, a huge, flying object that resembles a video-game creature looms in the air before him -- buzzing and pulsating in a graphic fever.
"Hello, Yar," Davidson says calmly, naming the fly. "You'll need some weapons." With this, the weapons -- blades of flickering light -- appear. "Because you'll have a formidable enemy -- the Qotile."
Directly in back of Davidson, the Qotile sneaks into view. And suddenly a battle erupts: Yar versus the Qotile, both streaking, shooting, bursting with color and motion above, below, and behind.
It's all part of a new, two-minute commercial that Atari has produced for movie theaters. If the spot is as successful as the company hopes, it wil move you to buy three new Atari products (including the game Yar's Revenge).
The company that produced the ad for Atari is the Los Angeles-based studio Robert Abel and Associates. When you visit Abel's shop, you see all the signs of a breakneck pace: 30 phone calls to the switchboard in 10 minutes, couriers to Tokyo cooling their heels as rush deliveries are hurriedly packaged. The demand for this work is high, even at an average cost of $100,000 for a 30-second spot. As Bob Abel himself explains, "Firms have new technology to sell, and they realize they can't use an old-looking commercial to sell it."
Two of the Abel staffers behind the Atari commercial were designer-director Clark Anderson and codirector and technical expert John Hughes. "The Atari storyboard as we first received it was conceived in very flat terms," says Anderson. "But we knew we had a big theater screen to work with -- twice as wide as it was high. And we have the E&S (Evans and Sutherland) machine, which we use to choreograph computer graphics to give an illusion of three dimensions." So Anderson redrew the storyboard to show what the team at Atari could do. "I knew that the game elements the character was creating would be more interesting if they were flying at him, or around him, rather than just happening in front of him."
Next the Abel team constructed an animatic, a full-perspective mock-up of the commercial displayed on the system's high-resolution, black-and-white video screen. Explains Anderson: "In a commercial as complex as this, our pacing, timing of picture to words, and camera angles all must be set in advance. That's what the animatic shows us."
(Photograph 1: The animatic for the ad)
To create the animatic, the Abel staffers must enter line drawings representing the elements in the commercial (including a simple outline of the actor and his chair) into the E&S computer. A drawing of a particular object can be placed atop a data tablet -- an electronic drawing table -- linked to the computer and outlined by hand with a special stylus. Some shapes are easier than others. "To express a square, for example," says Anderson, "I'll mark its four corners with the stylus. For drawing in three dimensions, 1 mark points for three views -- side, top, and front." Some shapes, as Hughes notes, are created by typing commands on the computer's keyboard. "With our software, if an object has curved surfaces, it's easier to create it mathematically."
Once an image appears on the video screen, Anderson and Hughes can move it around with a joystick or a series of knobs. "Motion-control cameras can only physically pitch and yaw a given distance," says Anderson, "but once you take choreography completely into the computer, you can fly objects on-screen all over the place and not worry about tangling up wires and equipment."
With the animatic as a guide, the elements for the final, on-film shoot are assembled. First, Abel's older, motion-controlled cameras are used to photograph the logo and titles. The camera slides toward or away from the titles on a track up to 50 feet in length. The titles themselves are positioned on a light box, which can move in the same roll-pitch-yaw configuration as the creatures on the video screen ("It's run by the same software," explains Hughes).
Then, in another room, the resulting footage may be streaked -- the industry's word for the time-exposure technique that can make a network logo look like it has a vapor trail. "It's simple," Andferson explains. "You open the lens of your camera partway while it's moving, smearing the image."
What about filling in all the objects outlined by the computer? Abel's vector-graphics system produces only white lines, not solid areas, so the computer is instructed to display a thicket of tightly packed parallel lines that, at a distance, resembles a solid shape. Then there is the task of adding color and shading to all those lines. "For most of the Atari job," says Hughes, "we simply placed color filters between the video screen and our thirty-five-millimeter movie cameras."
Finally, it's time to film the live-action part of the commercial. For the Atari spot, the live action was filmed in front of what appeared to be a blue, 40-by-60-foot light box turned on its side so the background could later be dropped out.
(Photograph 2: Live-action filming)
"In the finished spot, the animated effects would be zooming around the actor," notes Anderson, "so as we shot him live, we also had to throw light on him from different directions. To pull this off in the commercial, we used a system of computerized lighting cues, like the systems used at large rock concerts. It coordinated eighty lighting events in two minutes." For cues, the actor watched the animatic on a hidden video monitor. "It took three days to coordinate all of it and program the lighting," says Anderson, "but we did the actual shooting in one day." After the matting process blended the synthetic and live-action footage, all that remained was to add the sound effects, make prints, and then produce copies.
(Photograph 3: A frame from the completed ad)
"But the technology is not in charge here," says John Hughes emphatically. "All of the power is where it should be, with the designers."
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