Legends Boxing 30 Second Commercial

Working with Bryce Media, I was brought on as an on-set VFX consultant and as the post-production VFX/Motion Graphics artist for a 30 second web spot for Legends Boxing.

The Prompt

The primary goal of the spot was to show how Legends Boxing can be used as a tool for empowerment. With this prompt Neil Bryce and one of the owners of Legend Boxing scripted a 30 second spot featuring a woman between 35 and 40 reviewing the daily struggles that she and many other face. 3D text/graphics would be incorporated inside the real space of several shots, words representing these negative feelings. Throughout the spot, this woman would be punching a punching bag, and at the same time destroying these negative words floating around her. The spot continues, the words finally all destroyed, the woman “resolves” these negative emotions, with a visible sense of relief. Graphically, positive words are illuminated on her arms and travel upwards.

On-Set Production

On-set, Neil and I decided to simplify our shots as much as possible in order to fit the available budget of the job. Our primary tool for this was to stick to lock-off or on rail shots in order to eliminate any 3D camera tracking that would be needed otherwise.

Beyond these suggestions, I stayed on-set to act as director of photography and help setup lighting and shots for Neil. Just a second pair of eyes to get ensure attractive and usable shots.

Post-Prodcution

All post VFX work was done in blender. Most shots were locked off, so it was just a matter of matching focal lengths, and figuring out approximate height of the camera and other distances for masking our punching bags and other objects in the scene. Then, just placing animating and exploding text where appropriate.

The tricky shots were the arms and the blue glowing words on the woman’s arms. I had to create 3D maquettes for the arms, and then manually rotoscope the maquettes to match the movement of her arms. Besides a single 2D track to get the basic movement of the arms, this needed to be an entirely manual object track.

The maquettes where rigged and modeled as closely as possible to the real arms, but 2d masks for the silhouettes of her arms were still needed to restrict the textured glowing letters to the positive space of the woman’s arms. After masking and animating the maquettes was finished, I was able to add and composite anything on the the arms of the woman. At this point I did a 2D animation of the veins and words that would appear on the arms, and then applied this has a texture on the 3D maquette.

The composite on top of the real footage was simple to approach. Blurring and film grain in Blender’s compositor was added. With one special case of the last close up shot, near the clavicle where her shirt covers some of the text, I needed an additional mask to blur and diffuse the light of the text to simulate it passing through the cloth of the shirt.

All graphics went through about 3 revisions to get to their final product.