Walter,  I posted this in another forum

Re: Walter,  I posted this in another forum

What you see it part two of a spot I shot a year earlier. In that spot the book does what yo see and at the end the hardcover slams closed on the table and we see it for a few seconds, the announcer tags the spot and it fades to black. A year later the agency asked me if we could do the same thing with a paperback. I said no, it would be too difficult. After hanging up the phone an idea hit me. The original spot was shot on 35mm film as are most national commercials. I took the original negative of the commercial and brought it to what's called a negative cutter asking him to take out one frame of film where the book is at rest in the final shot. I took that frame to a professional film lab called Duggal and asked them to make prints. I shot the spot on 200EI film meaning I could not blow it up big as grain would start to show. So we determined that 18x24 would be good. I had 15 prints made at $1000. I had my prop man Bobby Provenzano build me a sled that could fire the paperback though the back of the prints. He made a contraption that you can see here:

http://www.film-and-video.com/sled.html

I used a high speed 35mm film camera (120fps) to film the still blow-up and the book being pushed through it. We loaded number one and rolled the camera. On action the print bulged but didn't rip. By number four I was worried as I had 15 prints. I remembered college where spent 15 hours a day developing prints. If you left a print in the bath too long the paper backing got soft. I had bobby cut S shaped serration's in the back of the remaining prints and then spray them with water. It worked, the book came through the print. I took what we shot and transferred it to video using the old spot as a color reference so we could match the shots. And there you have it. Just as the book comes to close, we cut to the new footage and the paperback appears to burst through the film, which it really is doing. The real beauty was in the sound. We went to a professional place I use called Howard Schwartz Sound. Here a combination of a cannon and a tennis racket is the sound of the book bursting through. It only cost us $2000 for the effect and sweetening of the sound. I now it sounds like a lot but it wasn't considering the budget for the commercial was $30,000. And this place has the best audio people in the business so you get more than you would anywhere else. You should see how much things cost when I do $250,000 spots.
 
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