Director and former Gondry assistant François Néméta sent a description of Snowboarder for Coca-Cola.
"snowboarder" was shot in feb'97 for Coca-Cola Japan, in preview of the Nagano Olympics 98. shot at Mammoth Mountain, California.
it tells the story of some japanese people in "frozen" moments, looking at some snowboarders doing some incredible jumps, frozen in the air.
it is based on the same "frozen moments" effect as the Rolling Stones, where there was a morph from one still photograph to another one, but this time instead of two cameras, we used up to 5 cameras. the effect was quite extraordinary.
the post production, done at Buf in Paris (www.buf.fr) was a huge work...
I think the music is a remixed song of the Icelandic band Gus Gus.
we had to fly nearly all the japanese community from L.A. to Mammoth Mountain, and we had some real snowboarders champions for the shoot.
Thanks François!
You can see the clip at BUF's site here.
According to Ars Electronica 1997 site:
"We reconstructed the movement of a camera using synchronized still frames shot from different perspectives. For this we combine several layers of 2D morphing with 3D models using BUF stereo mapping. This method is called stereo pro-grammetrie and uses the software Softimage, Elastic reality, Tmorph, and special BUF software."
The VFX supervisor for the snowboarder ad was Francesco Grisi, who was also the VFX supervisor for Jòga. See an article about Grisi here.
