Things you can do with an iPhone…

Screen shot 2009-12-11 at 11.21.24 PM

Filmed in one shot entirely on an iPhone, “Apples” was created, produced and finished by The Mill NY with award-winning, marketing communications agency Draftfcb New York. City Harvest asked Draftfcb for a commercial that conveyed a lot of food is wasted in a voluminous way. The iPhone captured a realistic feel people empathize with, and one that lends to a digital life as a viral film and a cinema vérité-styled commercial. The Apples were created entirely using CGI.

Yann Mabille, The Mill’s Joint Head of 3D, and co-director of “Apples”, explains that the iPhone was singled out by the team for its practical playback feature, and overwhelming popularity and near ubiquitous presence among cell phone users. The spot was filmed in one day, and took three weeks to finish, Mabille says. Although its resulting style is low-fi, finessing that look and feel took technical expertise and innovation behind the scenes.

Angus Kneale, The Mill’s Creative Director and co-director of “Apples”, explains an exact virtual camera move had to be created that matched the physical iPhone camera. “Due to the rolling shutter from the CMOS sensor, the raw footage was slightly distorted,” Kneale explains. “Regular tracking software could not work.”

Screen shot 2009-12-11 at 11.21.37 PM

Armed with this knowledge before the shoot, The Mill created an innovative tracking rig for the iPhone. “It would have been impossible to track the iPhone camera without the rig,” adds Vince Baertsoen, Lead 3D, The Mill. “We had to re-create a motion capture set up in the station. On set, we looked at places we could put cameras and determined how we could triangulate the rig. We used three Canon 5D Mark 2 static cameras to record everything in sync simultaneously.”

“The rig was designed to clearly show the iPhone’s exact position and orientation in 3D space,” Kneale elaborates. “The three Canon 5D Mark 2 cameras captured the iPhone’s movement from three varying perspectives. The rig had multiple LED lights attached to make the ‘tracking points’ clearly visible in the subdued light. The rigging simplified 80% of the work, but a lot of fine-tuning was done by hand, sometimes frame by frame.

“Full HDRI’s of the location were captured,” Kneale continues. “A Spheron Camera was used to capture multiple 360-degree scans that provided exact survey data and lighting conditions of the whole subway platform and train. This data was used to accurately construct the virtual environment and used for everything from modeling to texturing and lighting.

“The CGI was composited into the original live action by our lead Flame artist Cole Schreiber. It was important to work at the native resolution of the iPhone and match the codec compression artifacts,” Kneale relates. “Cole carefully integrated the apples into the footage by emulating the dynamic range and white balance of the iPhone, ultimately color matching the apples. Subtle details were added such as green color spill, shadows and reflections. The dynamic auto exposure changes of the iPhone also had to be matched. The tracking was given one last tweak in Flame locking the CGI into the live action.

The resulting “Apples” commercial has a man-on-the-street sensibility. It is also a fine example of the influence of user-generated content in advertising thanks to the iPhone and the star quality of Apples. “Our goal with this year’s campaign is to visualize the numbers behind the hunger problem in New York—both the amount of food that goes to waste and the number of residents that go hungry,” explains Keith Loell, Executive Creative Director, Draftfcb. “We’re hoping that the sight of a few hundred thousand apples pouring out of a subway car will get the attention of potential donors.”