With our New England Patriots once again in the hunt for the Super Bowl, I’d be remiss if I didn’t include this assignment for Comast featuring Richard Seymour from a few years back. We had shot a number of Comcast ads for Carlsen/Fried prior to this one, with Teddy Bruschi, Mike Vrabel, and Coach Jim Calhoun of the UCONN Huskies. This assignment, however, stands out as my favorite because of the originality of the concept. We were to create an image of Richard Seymour sitting on the Longfellow Bridge behind the end zone, with a remote in his hand and the Comcast screen displayed on the Jumbotron.
The first step was to shoot the end zone with the bridge behind it. We were fortunate to have a good, sunny day and a cooperative grounds crew. They brought out some leaf blowers to clear the field of confetti. The stadium had been rented out the night before, for a Bar Mitzvah, and there was still some debris on the field. After clearing the field, the crew let us use their scissor lift, and suppled a couple sheets of plywood to wheel it out on the field without leaving any wheel marks. We got the shot we needed, and returned to Boston to check them out, and plan the next step.
There wasn’t a very interesting sky that day, so we shot a replacement sky from the roof of our building.
original sky
sky shot from studio roof
sky silo’d out
stadium with new sly
There was some additional retouching required in the stadium shot. The field was still marked for soccer, so we had to fix that. There was a McDonald’s below the Jumbotron that had to go away, and a number of other cosmetic issues, like dirt beyond the field from Patriot Place construction.
The next step was to shoot Richard Seymour in the studio. It was obvious the sun was coming from our right side from the shadows on the pavement left of the seats. We also knew his right foot would be up on the curbed landscaped area. And we knew his shadow would be cast on the wall and structure to his right. So we created a white block for his raised foot, and placed white foam core sheets along side him to represent the wall.
shot with approximate shadows
silo'd
The last stage was positioning him, getting the scale right, and making sure the shadows conformed to the contours of the surroundings. I like to pride myself on making the little details just right, so, even though you know it’s not real, it looks like it could be.
All in all, a great assignment, with a great team….and no gremlins or hiccups along the way!