When the Pittsburgh Zoo wanted to promote a new polar-bear exhibit, it turned to local VFX studio Animal and director Michael Killen for a spot that used seamless VFX to plant a surprise in the Ohio River – a real polar bear that has local swimmers scrambling for the shore. Watch the spot, below, then listen to Killen’s audio commentary (and keep reading for more details).

Watch the spot …

… and then listen to the audio commentary.

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The idea was to make the spot look like a single take of handheld home-video footage from a chilly winter outing as Pittsburgh’s local polar-bear club heads into the freezing water. Partway through the :30 spot, the camera suddenly zooms in on a polar bear paddling through the choppy waters, then zooms back out as the panicked swimmers leave the water. At the end of the spot, the camera is apparently dropped to the ground by the startled operator.

“Instead of covering it like a traditional spot, I believed it would have much more impact if the viewer thought it had been captured by chance,” says Killen, recounting the genesis of the idea to shootthe spot in a phony “reality” style. It seems to focus on one of the swimmers, who seems a little reluctant to go in the water. That’s a tiny bit of misdirection meant to make the polar bear’s appearance on screen more of a surprise to viewers.

Of course, convincing illusions don’t come cheap. Despite the spot’s deliberately low-end DV appearance, it was actually shot with a Sony HDC-F950 HDCAM and color-corrected in Flame to get that precisely junky look. The high-quality HD capture would contain enough tracking data – floating buoys purchased at Target and placed in the water by Pittsburgh’s River Rescue Unit specified the position of the bear in the frame, and landmarks in the background of the shot provided numerous reference points – to allow the convincing integration of stock footage of a polar bear.

“I broke the spot down second-by-second, figuring out where we had to get our camera to make it feel natural – pan left, pan right, zoom out, come in – knowing that we had to reach a certain point at a certain time,” Killen says. “As the director, my toughest task was, with all these burdens, to have an actor come across and convey the newness of the situation. We used actual polar-bear club members except for the key actor, Tom Kurlander, who did a fantastic job.”

There was also the considerable problem of making the spot look cold, including the placement of fake snow on the ground and in the air. “We put Hollywood snow on the ground in a 50-by-100-foot area, and we covered some of the background by building a snow mound,” Killen says. “I also wanted some live-action snow, so we brought snow candles and a snow machine on set, too.” VFX artists augmented those elements digitally (with layers of falling snow and breath vapor) and eliminated telltale indications of summery weather – including taking the color off of trees in the background and removing a fountain that could be seen on the other side of the river, in downtown Pittsburgh.

“Then there was an overall color-correction, a little bit of blur in and blur out to show the camera losing focus, and some deterioration of the image,” Killen says. “When the camera gets set down, we added the bump and roll of the lens, and there’s an actual edit hidden in there. There were a few subtleties that we pushed to give it a legitimate DV feel.”