In the latest spot promoting the Madden NFL 10 video game, two marquee players from last year’s Super Bowl collide, battling for every blade of grass. Their teammates on the field join the struggle, followed quickly by players and coaches from the sidelines before the fans from the opposing teams empty the stadium and rush onto the field to join the mass of humanity. Surprisingly much of the action was down on camera and there was no greenscreen involved. For the VFX team at The Mill this made some things easier and others harder as they had to redesign the stadium and add in thousands of CG fans all into shots that were frantically handheld. We spoke with Flame artist Tara Demarco at The Mill, LA, about their work on the spot for EA Sports.

How was this spot shot and what sort of plates did you have to work with?
There was no greenscreen involved. There were some plates of crowds shot on location for the opening shots. All of the action is in-camera. We added 2D crowds for places where we needed to fill up the stadium. We did that in most of the shots. We did some paint cleanup and added some smoke to make it look consistent.

What about as the ad progressed and more and more people come onto the field?
There are four Massive shots. They could only fill a small part of the stadium with real people. There are two shaky follow–cam shots where the camera is running behind the person. In the background are a bunch of Massive agents filling up the field in those two running shots.

The final two shots were Massive agents?
Yes. In the final two shots there is just a small crowd in the center of the field, the players from the NFL and a number of extra football players and fans. Then everything else was Massive. There was a lot of making uniforms and helmets and adding different colors to the fans of both teams.

What were the challenges of creating the Massive agents for this spot?
The main challenge of the Massive work was trying to get the crowd to work as a diverse crowd and then work as for one team or another team. In the wide shot there are about 17,000 agents. It was tricky to get them all to do what we wanted. We had to make the agents a little random, to act like a huge crowd, but also consistent because the whole point of the spot is to make the players and fans of the opposing teams push against each other. Most of them needed to push but we needed others to be strolling or running off in other directions, to get a natural representation of a crowd, even in this unique scenario. Otherwise they would be all running at the same speed, in the same direction all the time.

The stadium that is in the commercial is not the stadium where it was shot, correct?
Yes. The stadium they shot in was the LA coliseum so there was the track and field section and the columns of the Coliseum. So we had to match the stadium in the pull out shot and the wide shot. That required a lot of paint work, resizing the field and placing it correctly. There were a lot of set extensions and manipulation.

How difficult was it to add all those elements with the shaky handheld shots?
It was tough. The agency really wanted that gritty, Any Given Sunday, raw feel so nothing was locked off, nothing was set up for effects. So it was a bit of a tracking challenge. It just requires some special tracking skills and a lot of time.

What appealed to you about working on this commercial?
It’s interesting working on a commercial like this because you just want to create real life, where the effects don’t dazzle or even stand out. Once we get to a point where [a viewer] doesn’t notice the effects and just concentrates on the story then we know we’ve done our job.