Translating the style of famous photographer Peter Funch
Introduction
It's not every day that you get invited to shoot a UBS campaign alongside one of the artists you grew up looking up to: Peter Funch. If you don't know his street photography work (for example 42nd and Vanderbilt) you certainly will remember the photographs of the Sony San Francisco bouncy balls campaign. But for this campaign, the agency selected his long exposure slow-sync flash work posing inherent technical challenges for the moving visual I was to create alongside his stills.
Making a slow-sync flash photo style visualizer:
- For long exposures you want to leave the aperture open longer than your typical frame rate.
- In photography the flash isolates your subject keeping it crisp sharp as opposed to every other moving part of the image.
- In a still frame the camera does not move, but for a visualizer you want to move the camera, which bringing up the need for motion control.
Table of Contents:
Tackling the impossible
It should be clear by now that bringing this style over to moving visuals would not be an in camera deal. The more complicated or abstract a project gets the clearer I usually try to make the desired outcome. So, in the most simple words, why did the agency choose this visual style to communicate the client's vision: reassurance in high velocity business environments or "a rock in stormy seas".
A VFX style choice
With that, it became quickly clear that the backgrounds had to remain sharp and only our background talents would be blurred by motion. For this we had to rely on multiple motion-controlled passes of foreground, background talent and clean plate passes. If we'd already shot with long shutter speeds we could no longer extract the background talents elementsbecause the background behind their motion-blurred areas would be impossible to replace with a sharp background. And just like that, the type and amount of motion blur was purely a VFX post decision.
Other Articles
