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Charlex Rides the Subway
Published on Wednesday, 10 August 2011
Charlex took over all the live-action, design and VFX work for the new Subway Fresh Fit campaign, 
including a shoot with the ARRI ALEXA and a combination of practical, 2D and CG elements.
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| The first spot, ‘That's a Lot’, opens with images of greasy burgers frying on a grill. It then switches to a series of seemingly innocent images - kiddie pools, birdbaths and water coolers. These items, typically filled with water, are instead filled with grease in order to visually illustrate how much grease fast food chains use in a single year. "The concept from the agency was to use strong graphic images to get this message across, and they asked me to help visually portray the grease in ways that were impactful but not too off-putting," said Charlex CD Ryan Dunn. | |
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| "Once we had established the look and behaviour of the grease as well as how it was going to be shot, I developed an editorial style that moves between wide and tight shots in order to break up the rhythm and 'feel' the vastness instead of just see it," said Ryan. "I didn't want to make it about anything except visualizing the statistic in a strong, simply manner. So the shots are all locked off, and any animation besides the opening hose pour was peripheral. A flock of birds in the sky, for instance, or a bubble gurgling through a water cooler filled with grease." This approach helped focus the impact of the spot as well as the density of the images that the team later composited together. | |
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| Ryan and his team spent a day in Connecticut shooting all of the exterior elements. They also had a night shoot to cover the office building interior, and an additional day filming the table-top of the burger that sets off the grease sequence. "It was an interesting job for sure with a documentary feel to it, and a bit of a new angle for Subway.” According to Ryan, the overall process was traditional in terms of how the live-action was completed. "We used actual grease in the kiddie pools shots, but substituted liquids for the rest," he explains. He shot the piece with the ARRI ALEXA camera. "I really like the way it captures imagery. It feels like film, even though it's a digital system, with more detail in the highlights than I had become used to with other digital cameras." To portray the thicker viscosity of grease for certain shots, Dunn filmed at a higher frame rate in order to slow the action down a little. Ryan compiled a series of elements that could later be composited together in post. "While in reality, we only had a dozen kiddie pools for the wide shot, we moved them around a locked off plate and had our Flame artists clone and composite these shot elements in order to fill the entire field," he said. "The bird baths were about one hundred pounds a piece, however, so we couldn't really move them around that hillside as nimbly. Our VFX team helped by using the scant reference plates to bring the hillside to life with CG." www.charlex.com Agency: MMB Boston Post Production: Charlex Creative Director: Ryan Dunn VFX Supervisor: Steve Chiarello Live Action Producer: Diane Leuci Lead Editor: John Zawisha Flame Artists: Marc Goldfine, John Yu 2D Compositor: Jun Lee Lead Lighter: James Fisher Lead Modeler: Alex Cheparev Lead Rigger: Steve Mann Lead CG Animator: Tony Tabtong CG Supervisor: Keith McCabe |
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