How do they do that TGI Friday's commercial?

I’m referring to the TV ad where all the action stops, then pans around in a half-circle to another point-of-view.

For example, in one scene, a lady is popping a piece of food into her mouth. It freezes in mid-toss, then the shot goes around to the front of her face and over to the other side.

I would guess it involves shooting the scene with multiple cameras at once and then doing some creative editing. But why can’t you see the cameras on her right side when the shot is from her left side?


Give me immortality, or give me death!

they set up a string of cameras on a simi-circle base and take simultanious pictures with them. When the pictures are played like movie cells it appears to revolve around a frozen object. Coolest and simplest new effect i have seen!


I was sad because I had no shoes, until I saw a snake with no legs.

  • A Wally original.

Ever see the movie The Matrix? Same trick.

In The Matrix 120 (or so) cameras were positioned in a half-circle around where the actors would be. The cameras, the stage and the background are ALL covered in green (at least it was for The Matrix…any color could be used). A computer controlled the firing sequence of the cameras. That firing sequence could be manipulated in a huge variety of ways to achieve different effects.

The green covereing everything is the same thing as the blue screen technique used in films like Star Wars…except it’s green instead of blue (don’t know if there is a good reason for choosing green over blue or if they just wanted to be different). Doesn’t matter what color you use…through computers or other techniques you remove all the green of that VERY specific hue and replace it with something else you filmed earlier (i.e. the inside of a TGI Friday’s restaurant).

That’s about it! Pretty cool technique…

I first noticed this special effect in a Gap ad about two years ago and thought it was great—now a whole buncha commercials are using it. It’s still very cool, but I think we’ll be sick to death of it in a few months.

Remember when morphing became really big in the early '90s, right after Michael Jackson’s “Black or White” video used it? Pretty soon, every damn commercial had morphing, whether it was appropriate or not . . .

How do they deal with the lenses of the cameras? They obviously couldn’t be covered in green. Just some more elaborate computer-editing excision?


Give me immortality, or give me death!

The cameras used in The Matrix were in a semi-circle AND staggered from high on one side sloping down to low on the other side. The cameras ONLY want to focus on the actors…they aren’t trying to get a wide field view of everything around them. Since the cameras view is carefully restricted it never ‘sees’ the camera on the other side. Also…since they are arranged in a semi-circle there are no cameras behind the actors to clutter the scene.

Roger Ebert and his Movie Answer Man self did a couple of columns about this about four or five months ago. Unfortunately, the columns are too old to be up on his website. :frowning:
If you really care, though, you could probably find it in old papers at the library…


“One more anal-probing, gyro, pyro, levitating, eco-plasm, alien anti-matter story and I’m gonna take out my gun and shoot somebody.”
– Fox Mulder

The one in the Gap commercial (I’ve never seen it, I just read this somewhere) wasn’t done that way. They cheated and used 3D computer graphics to achieve the effects.

And The Matrix didn’t always do it that way either. Sometimes they did, but sometimes there was movement in the shot so it wasn’t a simultaneous snap of the camera. And also occasionally they totally cheated and used computer animation to achieve the effect.

However, the answer to the OP is, a greenscreen or bluescreen is used for fast, simple extraction of a background from the main action. People have fuzzy edges - clothes, hair, motion etc which, if you were painting on the screen by hand would be hard to find the defining edge for. A greenscreen makes the locating of that edge easier.

So, when the still camera is on the green part of the image, it’s easy enough for the effects artist just to quickly erase it’s appearance in the scene with a swipe, but harder if the camera interacts with the thing the camera is targeted on and wants to keep in the scene (i.e. the actor).

Er… I hope that was clear enough.

Two questions:

  1. Does this technique require a green screen, or could they have just set up a semicircle of cameras inside a TGI Friday’s?

  2. What about that scene in the commercial where, instead of ROTATING the point of view around a frozen scene, it ZOOMS IN on one?

Good question.

  1. The green screen is so you can erase the cameras if they got in shot. If they don’t get in shot (clever positioning, or not totally 180 degree turn) then you could do it in an actual Gap Studio.

  2. Do you mean zoom, or track in? A zoom can be achieved with a stationary camera. A track in (which would affect perspective) would be trickier…

There’s actually a pretty good description of the “bullet time” effect on the DVD version of The Matrix. I recommend that you watch it. Essentailly, there are a lot of high-speed cameras arranged around the scene. These cameras are contolled very precisely by computers. If any of the cameras get in another camera’s shot, they are edited out using modern computer-based post-production techniques. Then the backgrounds are added.

I remember a month or three ago, I think there was a question of the same type here, and someone posted the url of the company that makes the cameras used in those effects… unfortunately, I can’t remember the url or name of the company… IIRC, they make the cameras, and rent them out as well as their production services…

A note to clarify:

Green-screen or blue-screen effects don’t require computers to remove the hued background. It’s an ‘in-camera’ effect; in essence, the cameras are adjusted so that they can’t ‘see’ that specific shade, and the background (or whatever) can then be filled with whatever image you want.

That makes it handy for fun live-studio shenanegans, such as the game on “Whose Line Is It Anyway?” when Colin Mochrie (sp?) stands in front of a blue screen while the audience watches monitors that show him, say, in the middle of a school of sharks. Colin then has to guess what the background is.

That is 100% WRONG. Blue-screen or green-screen matting processes typically do NOT use a three-strip Technicolor process, therefore there is  NO way a film can be "ajusted" to not see one specific color. And I do mean specific. The cheaper mattes are the ones used by television stations for the weather report. The Meteorologist must be careful not to wear a color too close to that of the matte, otherwise their tie will suddenly become the state of Delaware.

In traditional film work, the green screen shot is then used to create a Hi-Con pass of the same shot. This high contrast pass is used in an optical printer machine, where JUST the information blocked by the dense black negative is held out. Then, as many passes are done as needed to achieve the positive print. In one famed shot in “Return of The Jedi”, there are a gazillion ships whirling in space in every direction. There’s a great moment in some documentary on the SP_EFX of that series where the supervisor said, “We decided to have ONE shot like this, with more matte elements moving than had ever been done before”. It took months to get it.

A lot of the travelling matte/ green-screen work has been supplanted by CGI work. On a Silicon Graphics Workstation, or a Sun Workstation, this kind of process is done purely by computer, then the final rendered frames are “printed” onto film.

One can tweak a camera ( usually by remote ) to not be as sensitive to certain colors, but that is ONLY a video camera, and is really not done any more at this point. Since it is so very easy to manipulate an image in Post-Production, the image is typically left very “clean” during the shoot itself. Many are the moments when we’ve all stood around the storyboards, talking about how far we want to take something ON THE SET, opposed to leaving it for the Post people. We almost always wind up leaving it- not out of laziness, but because once a color, shading, focus, speed, etc is changed and the shot is made, it’s permanently ON the film. You cannot miraculously re-focus a shot you made out of focus. ( It’s easy to fuzzy down a crisp shot, of course…). And, if you have done a shot in extreme high speed ( say, 150 fps ), you cannot make it be normal speed in post. HOWEVER- that series of Ford commercials that has been running for months? Where the camera moves at a certain speed, then frantically covers 40 yards in a second, then slows again? That is ENTIRELY done in post. While you can indeed program a film camera to ramp up and down during a shot ( I will do one such shot on this coming Sunday), it is far easier to manipulate the time of the shot, and the speed of that effect in post. You simply show only every 10th frame, or 40th frame, or whatever you chose. In this way, the original footage is pristine, shot at 24 frames per second ( normal synch sound speed ), and then toyed with in post.

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