Case Study

We teamed with Innocean, director Peter Berg, Pony Show Entertainment, Heidi Black at Whitehouse Post, and Hyundai to bring Ryanville to Super Bowl 50.

We were brought in early on to perform the previsualization for the project. Our previsualization was instrumental in helping us and the production team understand what was possible in the 30 seconds we had—there ended up being many scenes that were dropped, simply due to lack of screen time (think along the lines of Ryan the firefighter saving a cat from a tree, or Ryan tossing a newspaper to himself).

A key element in our previsualization was handing it off to editor Heidi Black, who cut the pre-vis together to inform the pacing. This helped sell the agency on a simpler script to let the spot breath.

We also acted as a supervising presence on set—a spot like Ryanville presented our team with a number of unique challenges. Time, as always, was a main factor, though it was additionally compounded by celebrity schedule. Filming under tight time constraints on a motion control shoot is always difficult, for fear of running into tech issues, which only slows things down more.

The most challenging problem was how to approach the Ryan Reynolds cloning shots. Most the cloning shots were dolly moves with nodal tilts and focus shifts. For these, we suggested a Techno Crane to allow for repeatable moves with many channels of control.

One setup had 6 separate plates of Reynolds working as a road construction crew. The tricky thing was that Reynolds only used a jackhammer in one pass—a complex thing to include on a motion control shoot, as there was potential it would vibrate the camera. To squash that possibility, we overlaid everything on location to test alignment of all the plates

The final film shows us 13 stand alone, believable Ryan Reynolds. Ryanville premiered to critical success during the second quarter of Super Bowl 50.