How hard can it be to make a commercial like this?
I mean, you get a yellow board, turntable, tall glass, and a lime.
Tastes good. How did they get the lime to land like that,
and the water to arc straight up when it’s rotating, and why doesn’t the ice go to
the side if it’s spinning? How does it move in slow motion but spin so
fast? We ended up calling the spinning rig of death,
I think is, was the the technical term we gave the the whole device.
I'm Steve Giralt. I'm a director and visual engineer.
I found it's easier to start with saying I'm a TV commercial director that does food and
beverage. That's like the core. Beginning. Then I say, but we use all sorts of crazy
robots and rigs and things to do it, because we need super accurate timing and control
of events and impacts It's kind of art meets science.
You know, I think it's, it's fun to pick one specific example to kind of start off.
We sort of landed on that, that Jack Daniel's Honey commercial, just because it looks so
simple. They came to us with this idea and they're
like, “Oh, we want to drop a lime wedge into the drink and want to see it kind of
splash out while the camera's spins around it.”
So we're kind of like, “are you sure you need the camera's spinning around the thing?
We can't just spend the drink on a little turntable and that would be a million times
easier.” And they're like, “no no no, we want the
parallax of it running around.” And I’m like, “But you want this in super slow motion,”
and they’re like, “yeah, yeah, we want it in super slow motion.” I'm like, “well,
that means we've got to spend insanely fast. Cause once you slow it down, you're not moving
very fast.” And they're like, “yeah, yeah, let's do that.”
So on the bottom here, we've got weights that are holding the rig down.
Yeah. Yep. Because otherwise it's going to fly out the
window. It'll wiggle itself to the point that it falls
apart. Yeah. So basically that platform is going straight
to the ground, which is tied into all the weights and everything.
On that there's an arm that's coming out about six feet and then it's on a riser that's coming
up and the camera is bolted to that. Basically it was afour horsepower motor, you
know, driving this, this, you know, pulley around and around and run around. We got it
up to a hundred RPM. The other challenge that, you know, we didn't
think about right away is like, Oh wait. So if everything's spinning, how do you power
the camera? How do you get video off the camera, how do you power the lights that are on board
this spinning rig? We had a case full of batteries on the rig
itself that spun with the whole thing. We speed up the motor, go, go, go, go, go,
go, go until we're at the full, safe speed as we, we find it is the right level before
it things start getting unbalanced or scary to us.
It's a Phantom Veo 4k, so that'll do a thousand frames a second at four K resolution RAW.
We learned that, you know, the tripod head that we had mounted on it, the way the second
it got faster, that the camera just started like, yeah, tilting up like this. So we're
like, okay, we gotta make our own custom mounts. So we kind of just basically bolted the a
hundred thousand dollars Phantom camera to this.
The way that the Phantom camera works is different than any other camera. It actually doesn't
record to like a card. The Phantom actually records to just a RAM
buffer. So basically it just records until you hit
stop and it recorded the previous six seconds. It’ll overwrite itself, so basically it’s
constantly erasing what happened six seconds ago.
As if you didn’t have enough pressure already. So we, we actually rigged a little, uh, RC
car servo. So like push the button via a little remote control, you know, for us also.
We started out with a piece of plywood that we curved, um, and then actually in early
testing, it broke, um, halfway through the spin.
We did a laminate kind of like what you use for countertops.
Within that too, we needed to make sure the drink looked good.
The food stylist would do that. Um, and that's, you know, one of our challenges is that the
lighting has to be great. Once we got the rig, we got the cameras secured,
we got the lighting figured out, and then we had to drop a lime in the center of this
thing on cue. So, uh, we had to build another device, um,
to do that. So basically a remote control device that
we mounted to the ceiling that had like little hinges, like kind of barn doors that just
kinda like flapped open when we, when you push the button so that we preloaded the lime,
we spun up the speed and then psh and then there went boom, down into the drink and get
the, you know, that, let us get the aim right. So we have three robots. They’re six axis
robots. They have names. There's one right behind
me here as the bolt, which we call Bob. And then there's Robbie, which is like, this
is a small version of Bob. And then we have Johnny five, which is our like slightly different
robot, uh, that doesn't work under the same software. So, you know, Johnny five is alive,
you know? “Hi honey, I’m home!”
“Number 5?” (Laughter)
The bolt initially, when you come to see your work it's sort of the showstopper for an outsider
like me, but then you realize that actually the crazy stuff is all the stuff that you're
making. I guess from the beginning you realized you'd
need to program supplementary robots to better control the motion of objects.
I started as a still photographer just doing still photos.
I started as a hobby taking classes in like MIG, welding, and TIG welding and woodworking
and plastics and epoxies and micro circuits and Maya.
I went down a multi-year continuing-ed rabbit hole.
I watch a few videos and like, okay, great. Now I know how to do that. Like here we go,
download initiated, you know?” Did you have, did you have any thoughts on
that, like on what would constitute the creative breakthrough for you?
You know, I, I don't give up very easily. If I plug in, it's just like, I'll keep going
until four in the morning or whatever it is. If it's like, if I'm making progress towards
something. Problem solving is like the core of my passions. It's just like, is, is how
do I solve that problem? Can I make it even better? You know, and the next time, can I
make it better?”
I had a lot of fun talking to Steve and learning about the work that he and his crew are doing.
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