The Mill collaborated with Accenture Song, RiffRaff Films, and Final Cut to create this silly spot for Confused.com. To think the world started clapping because of a sandwich!
“This was a fantastic project to be involved with, stunt men, sword fighting, puppeteering and a massive Colosseum.
The main challenge was to recreate an epic Roman Colosseum, the commercial was shot at the Nu Boyana film studio in Bulgaria as it has a 45-degree section of Colosseum set that was the perfect base for Confused. On the shoot days we had 200 hundred extras to make the crowd, so the approach to get as many crowd plates as possible for the ground tier and to extend tier 2 and tier 3 with CG crowd agents.
The opening wide shot's ground tier of the Colosseum was almost completely created from plates with very little CG, everything above was CG extension. During planning on the set recce we recreated the set in Maya as closely to dimensions as possible, we also realized that the Colosseum set wasn't wide enough to create the epic shot we wanted. We worked closely with the DP and AD as what would be possible on the day with the extras and time that we have on the day as it takes a lot of time to move 200 people around and how to maximize the resources at hand. We worked out that we could shoot that one section of set with 2 cameras, the first camera would cover the centre angle, the second camera would be several metres to the left of the first and rotated to create a sharper angle to create a sharper curve to the Colosseum wall. This effectively widened the shot to create a bigger space, we can then mirror the first and second camera in post to create the screen right sides of the Colosseum, we then needed to work out how many times we needed to move the crowd in order create the right density and to avoid doppelgangers. I think in total we did 10 crowd moves, jumbling them around each time they moved from section to section of that set, effectively creating 2000 extras from 200. We had a live overlay of the final shot composed on set spit screened. It was really pleasing to see a strong plan come together.”
Andy Steele, VFX Supervisor
