This Sprint commercial employs an awesome flashlight-painting stop motion animation. Basically, if the artist chose to do it the real way without CG, they used a flashlight to draw each frame of the stop motion animation during a long exposure shot. It had to have taken days to accomplish, and, I can’t even begin to imagine the amount of coordination that was necessary to pull it off. Also, the music is from the eclectic Australian band Architecture in Helsinki.
The Original Commercial
UPDATE: The following video is a behind the scenes look at how they made the commercial. It turns out they did do it the long and hard way, without any assistance from computers or lit wires. Truly amazing. Thanks rw for the pointer!
Making of the Sprint Commercial
July 6th, 2007 at 3:26 am
I’m confused, are you saying that it was done with CG or not. I’m hoping that it was done by hand as it would make the results even more amazing.
July 6th, 2007 at 9:54 am
I haven’t investigated, but I think it was probably done by hand. I read that the artist took several days of shooting to complete.
And yes, it is quite amazing
July 6th, 2007 at 3:21 pm
I saw the originators of this animation form at the Platform International Animation Festival, PIKA PIKA, they are from Japan ( http://tochka.jp/pikapika/ )
They basically take long exposure shots with a digital slr and compile them into an animation.
I hope Sprint is paying them for their idea.
July 6th, 2007 at 5:00 pm
it appears to be light painting, but after seeing it a few times, i’ve decided it’s a new version, made for moving images (aka film and video). what i think they’re using is el (electroluminescent)wire, instead of the traditional single point of light/time-lapse light painting technique used in photography. it creates the wonderful wobbly light forms, and yet doesn’t require the creators to frantically attempt to animate every line, which would likely be impossible.
so yes. i too believe it’s been made by hand.
wonderful
July 12th, 2007 at 12:41 am
this was done frame by frame at 15 fps using regular incandescent and LED flashlights. 10 artists took 4 nights working 12 hours a night to make the spot. there was no EL wire used and everything was drawn in the air. there were no computer effects added…occasionally the artists held wire as reference. the making of video is on youtube…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MfefTRDY4sc
July 13th, 2007 at 1:36 am
WOW…thanks so much for posting this. A friend and I were debating if this was real light painting or not. Turns out I was wrong! I thought it was too perfect and had to be CG. What an amazing movie!
July 16th, 2007 at 1:37 pm
Yeah, it’s all flashlight.
I can confirm since I live about two blocks away from where they did it and would watch from afar.
July 21st, 2007 at 9:47 pm
that’s fantastic!
animating every line of the sequence in thin air is amazing.