Pizza Hut 1 | BILLY ON THE STREET
Delivering for Pizza Hut.
When finished, Cinemagraphs are essentially a combination of a still and a video. But since the production is done in pieces, it’s important to previsualize what the end result will look like or you’ll end up with something resembling Frankenstein’s monster.
For this advertising video, we wanted the couple frozen in the foreground with a classic time-lapse behind them. That meant two shoots. One to shoot the couple. And a time-lapse plate for the background.
The production was in Times Square at magic hour. Which in Manhattan, happens to be rush hour. Which made the whole thing a logistical nightmare on par with herding cats. But we pushed through by boxing off the area, getting 300+ images of the couple and then taking care of the time lapse.
The best images, of course, were at dusk. But the ad was for “Billy on the Street and that show takes place during the day. So we selected a master shot, retouched it and then matched everything in After Effects.
In the end, we had a labor of love that became the first-ever Cinemagraph used as a broadcast TV spot. And I won an American Photo Motion Arts Award for the effort.
