AT&T Television Spot

This was one of my favorite shoots.   They had me in a full black skin tight outfit and had me fight a huge giant wooden wall against a green screen.  This was the shoot where I ran straight on at the wall with my head and heard my neck go " crk crk crk crk"   This was also my first experience outside of the circus on a flying rig. The rigger was also the same guy who did the Spider Man movies.  The back of my suit ripped during this so my bare ass was showing in the air. The rigger said that never happened to Spider Man.   damn super heroes...   From writer Fran Koenig    Harry Dorrington of Rhinoceros Visual Effects & Design has turned an immovable object into an irresistible spot. In "Solid", a :30 for AT&T via Young & Rubicam, the blue and white AT&T logo appears as a huge sphere against a stark white background. A small, silhouetted figure pokes, pushes, prods, and does all he can to dislodge the sturdy symbol. He struggles to no avail - but to great comic effect. According to director Dorrington, the project actually benefited from a scheduling difficulty. "The agency had a deadline of about two weeks. In order to execute a fully-animated concept, we would have needed about four weeks. But in hindsight, that time crunch forced us to explore other routes, and it enhanced the creative overall."  With an intensive CGI strategy out of the question, Dorrington and company decided to send in the clowns. "We auditioned about 50 potential performers - some were mimes, some were traditional clowns - and we had a hysterical day watching them perform pratfalls for us."  Eventually, the team settled on Rob Lok. "He was a living cartoon. He could move his body and alter its timing in such amazing ways. This project was a classic animation struggle, like The Roadrunner and Wile E. Coyote, which is centered around exaggeration and timing. It’s not only those frantic moments of action, but also those frozen moments where there's no action at all."    Meanwhile, the Rhinoceros art department set about building a 15-foot-high sphere out of wood, which was then padded to absorb the various stunts. Lok was then dressed in a black costume and mask and was filmed against a white background while launching his assault on the sphere. For one shot where the figure uses a lever to pry the sphere loose, but only goes sailing off the screen, a wire expert was brought in to rig the artist for his take-off."We storyboarded about 20 ideas and shot 12 or 13 of them," says Dorrington.   While it wasn’t a CGI project in nature, Rhinoceros artists did get to apply some software-based magic. Dorrington explains: "We did play with the actor's movement in post. We used speed ramping, for example, to give the pratfalls a broader, more exaggerated effect."The spot also benefited from some Inferno work, mainly to create shadows and reflections. And the sphere evolved into a rich, 3D object thanks to a treatment in Maya and Final Gathering in Mental Ray. Maya was also employed to track in certain props, and in the final scene where the entire environment - except the sphere - collapses around the hapless fellow.