Sean Broughton and Nic Seresin help Lipton "give It a Ponder"  in an inventive series of spots for LG.

In the latest series of spots for LG, Inside the Actor’s Studio‘s James Lipton transfers his signature beard to teens, advising them to “give it a ponder” before sending questionable texts. While director Ulf Johansson prefers to rely on props and makeup as much as possible, perfecting the hirsute illusion required intricate fine-tuning from post house Smoke & Mirrors New York (SMNY). Nic Seresin, lead VFX artist, and Sean Broughton, CCO, talked to Studio/Direct about the process and creating realistic facial hair under tight timelines
First, watch one of the spots, “Locker Room” (Nic and Sean’s favorite), then read the Q+A below.

Studio:  It’s not too often that you want to watch ads over and over, but these are consistently hilarious.
Nic: That’s all James Lipton’s performance, which is absolutely bang-on. Literally, he would do three takes maximum and he nailed it every time. What wasn’t so nailed down was the beard itself…

There were technical issues with the beard?  
Nic:  Yes, with the fake beard itself. The guy in prosthetics who removed Jame’s Lipton’s [actual] beard with makeup did an amazing job.
Sean: This was so the beard could be removed and you’d see nothing underneath it. They added prosthetic skin.
Nic: What was tricky was moving the fake beard, which was rigged. The crew got it as accurate as possible, but James Lipton’s face is quite different than the faces we were putting it on.
Sean: You can’t change the shape of a fake beard as it moves from a grown man to a teenager. It has to move across and shrink.

So you had to remove the rigging?
Nic: Yes, we had to apply hair on the reverse side to cover that up, which was added in post using the original side of the hair. So, you can imagine it was like two sides of the same coin. We had to apply the flip side of the beard to the inside of the beard and rotate around so you didn’t see the rigging.

How was it not having a greeenscreen?
Nic: We’ve been working with director Ulf Johansson for a long time-he’s been my client for the past decade. He’s much more about the performance and trying to make everything in-camera as much as possible. We usually just noodle it to get the right effect.
Sean: If you have a number of things to shoot in a short time, you physically don’t have the time to light greenscreen. You would also lose something that way. If you have people pretending to put on beards, you have nothing for the actors to react to, so it was important for all the action to happen in-camera.

What was the timeline for the shoot?
We shot four :45 commercials in two days. So as you can imagine there wasn’t a lot of prep time or rehearsals.

That must have created some challenges…

Nic: If you can see, there are not many cuts within the actual sequences because of Lipton’s delivery. So we were dealing with a lot of frames. We cleaned up the taking off of the beard, then the traveling of the beard and then it had to be clamped on the teen.

There, we had some problems. As soon as the beard was attached to the teenager, for whatever reason it wasn’t sticking. It kept falling off, so we had to paint the falling beard out. We had to do another pass of the teenager as close to the position with the beard on-which was purely done as a plate. We only had the opportunity to do it on “Angry” and “Locker Room”. On “Unicorn”, because I wasn’t there those days, they did a little bit of a shortcut. Imagine you put the beard on, then you have a cutaway. But, on the other two, we got it all in one take. The only element was to get the teenager as close to the beard position as possible. They had a make-up beard, where you wouldn’t see any of the joints. You had a takeover essentially-a combination of two beards. To make that, we had to backtrack the made-up beard on top of the rigged beard and track the textures of it, because the textures were slightly different.

Sean: You’re probably getting from this that it was quite an intricate process.

It sounds like it!
Nic: Tracking beards on human faces is one of the trickiest things to do because of the nuances of the face, which has so many subtle movements. If it’s not 100% on, then the shot doesn’t work.
Sean: The benefit of having Nic on set is that he can be incredibly adaptive. One day there was no way of keeping the beard on so they had one of the crew stand behind James Lipton and hold it on. So as it was placed onto the teen, someone leaned and just held it on. Nic removed the person in post.

What programs did you use?
Nic: The only program we used was Flame.
Sean: Ulf is very anti-CG. If he can humanly possibly do it without CG, he’ll go that route. He’d rather have the art department build rigs and marry that all with Flame in a 2D world.