Ted Humble-Smith
Heineken
Ted shot a fantastic Heineken campaign. The idea was to create a series of rugby moments (lineout, tackle and try) emanating from the frothy head of a pint of Heineken. After much spilt beer, and not all of it on the floor, many man / retouch hours later, the finished job was a resounding success with a very satisfied client.
The brief came from Vitamin V and posed a few simple questions. The main one being; can the job be done without a mortgage? Luckily for Heineken the answer was yes. Ted opted to use conventional retouching rather than CGI, which surprisingly gave a few more options.
It was decided that real rugby players should be photographed in the studio, for use as reference material. A day was spent collating a variety of action images which were then used to create human figures out of beer froth in post production.
Beer was then shot flying in every available direction and density, both liquid and bubbles, keeping the same lighting set up as with the human forms. The final day was taken up shooting glasses, condensation and pouring motions to capture as much "head action" as possible.
Once all the elements had been photographed, it was time to go to work on putting it all together. Having created the desired forms out of many bits of different people and making them shorter, taller, thinner, and fatter, a bubble version was constructed. Once this was complete, the new figures had to appear to be leaping flying and landing in beer. Hours later, after much patience and slow precise work the job was complete. What was left of the nine barrels didn't last long!
To see more of Ted Humble-Smith's work click here.