Houston-based ad agency The Lee Group (TLG) recently tapped Post Asylum to produce TV and radio spots for client, CHI St. Luke’s Health. The two TV spots for the new CHI St. Luke’s Health “Imagine” campaign feature an animated “current” flowing through various live-action scenes filmed by Chicago-based director, Kerry Shaw Brown working with Venice-based LA.B Film.
During pre-production, the Post Asylum design/vfx team explored different design treatments to settle on the best way for the CG “current.” Ultimately, PA lead animator, Alex Prudic-Dennis, honed in on a combination of texture, color, lighting and flowing movement for the “current” animation.
Senior producer, Amy Aitken and VFX Artist, Michael “Pants” Sands supervised production on location in Houston to insure all the live-action scenes were framed and choreographed with Prudic-Dennis’ CG current in mind.
“Shooting in a working hospital with real surgeons, doctors and technicians, meant we had to be flexible and get it right the first time,” said Aitken. “We ended up shooting several scenes with foreground talent over green, based on room availability limitations.”
Post Asylum’s Michael Fleetwood handled editorial. “Fleetwood is the perfect editor for this type of project,” said executive producer Graham Hagood. “He’s a top-notch creative cutter with several award-winning feature films to his credit, but he also has serious compositing and finish skills. His rough comps are so good, the agency doesn’t have to use their imagination to approve the off-line edits.”
TLG chose a library track from Post Asylum’s sister company, Pure Evil Music. Music senior composer Gary Parks then customized the track to sync perfectly with the spots. “This has been an area of major growth for us,” said Parks. “Agencies love having the option to license a track from our on-line PE Music library that we can go back into and post-score specifically for their spot.”
“For visual effects driven spots like these, we love working with one high-end shop that can handle it all,” said TLG creative director, Alan Babb. “Post Asylum took the project from animation design and previz, to VFX supervision – then through editorial, an awesome post-scored music track and all the way to finish. It’s a seamless process that yielded better spots for our client.”