There is an ESPN commercial currently airing that depicts an ‘ESPN Sportscaster’ inside a helicopter throwing baseball bats from an altitude of approximately 1000 feet over a city or town. Does anyone know how they filmed this? Blue Screen??? Flying directly above a park or lake??? Inflatable bats???
Whenever I watch that commercial, I harken back to that classic episode of “WKRP in Cincinnati” where the station throws turkeys out of a helicopter as an advertising gimmick.
“As God as my witness, I thought turkeys could fly.”
I would guess it was a blue screen, or an empty park, something like that. In any case, its a damn funny commercial.
Helicopters are expensive. My guess (I haven’t seen thje commercial) is it was probably a helicopter set with a bluescreen and a wind machine. (aka Really Big Fan)
I agree with friedo. The camara is too steady and the wind isn’t strong enough. It just doesn’t look like he is really in a helicopter.
Here’s the link. You’ll need activeX controls installed and on.
I my opinion, it’s too good to be green screen. Or, to be more precise, if it were green screened, it’d be damn expensive to pull it off that well.
For one thing, the background movements exactly sync to those of the foreground- that’s difficult to do when using a hand held camera, like they did here.
Secondly, if you look at the background close enough, it appears that the helicopter is over an undeveloped area. Their kinda moving up a shallow creek in the middle of knowwhere. The helicopter’s pretty low and you’d be able to see someone standing out, if there were anyone, pretty easily.
Finally, while a helicopter is expensive, renting one for an hour or two is’nt, especially for a network ad campaign.
I vote it’s real.
Oh my.
It’s still early here and that was my first post. Forgive me.
(On a couple of the mistakes, that is, not my opinion)
I think it’s real.
It’s a funny commercial with some (hopefully) obvious camera tricks. But, the commercials that amaze me are the Fox regional sports commercials, which show ‘sporting events’ of foreign countries including dirt diving, tree catching, etc. There is a web site that has these commercials on them. I can’t figure out the camera tricks involved. Anyone else seen these?
I heard that one with the “slapping contest” is actually a real sport somewhere! Anyone know where?