Time Sculpture

The second half of the 2000s (decade) saw electronics conglomerate Toshiba engaged in the high definition optical disc format war, in which it supported the HD DVD format.[2] In 2007, Toshiba made the decision to consolidate its European advertising ventures with a single advertising agency, where previously it had split its £25,000,000 marketing budget between Lowe, Saatchi & Saatchi, Grey Global Group, and Young & Rubicam.[3][4] In June 2007, Grey won the account with a pitch based around emphasising Toshiba's history in research and development, pushing the company's image as an "innovator in the field".[4][5] The first television and cinema commercial from the partnership, Light, lighter, aired in January 2008, to a lukewarm reception.[6]

The middling results of the campaign caused Grey to re-evaluate its approach, leading to a new campaign, which would see an advertisement "push the boundaries of what was possible.” To this end, Grey London re-examined several proposals presented to them in the past which had been abandoned as unworkable, before deciding upon a concept which had been proposed by Mitch Stratten. The idea, inspired by Eadweard Muybridge, was to build on the "bullet time" technology pioneered by the Wachowskis in the feature film The Matrix, by replacing the stills cameras with moving image cameras to show movement in a way not seen before appose to the frozen moment of "dead time". The title “time sculpture” came to the director on the way to Grey London with his producer where they presented the project as a production and post-production blueprint.

The idea had originally been put aside as unachievable for a singular reason: the project required a quantity of data unprecedented in a television commercial,[7] and would be one of the biggest visual effects jobs ever undertaken by a commercial production company.[8] After the technique was decided upon, the agency sourced a specific creative teams to collaborate with the director.[9] They wanted to restrict using computer-generated imagery,[7] and stuntwork would be kept to a minimum to maintain focus on the ordinary movements which would be seen in a completely new way through the technique.[9] Based on early tests films of the director, a simple treatment was assembled. The piece would be set in an art school studio to "showcase creativity at its rawest" according to creative director Andy Amadeo.[9] Timings of predeterminate movements of several performers were choreographed using computer simulations which also informed the set construction at Pinewood Studios where the shoot took place.[10] Colour was used to isolate movement and enhance structure.

It took over a month and a half to assemble the engineering team who would work on creating the custom 360 moving image capture system.[7] The rig which supported 200 Gigashot high-definition video cameras requisitioned from Toshiba,[7] was 1.8 m-high[11] and weighed over half a tonne.[8] It was constructed in two halves, each covering 180 degrees of the inward view of a 14 m circular space in the centre of the constructed set.[11] Once the rig itself was assembled, it took a team of four technicians three days to set the focus and alignment on all 200 cameras.[11] Technology devised by electrical engineer Richard Glover[7] was used to synchronously activate the entire system from a single remote control.[12]

Each of the fourteen performers in Time Sculpture were captured separately from all angles by the 200 cameras.[8] The resulting 110 hours of high definition footage, representing around 20 Tb of data, took post-production three weeks to process, running 24 hours a day, resulting in 2,500,000[7] single  frames.[8] In addition, the director had designed the workflow with a custom Edit Decision List and editing application to manage the vast amount of footage in the edit room. Independent programmers were commissioned to create this software, for use by editing company The Whitehouse.[8][9] The initial editing pass by editor Christophe Williams pared the film down to around 30 hours. The remaining data was passed back to The Mill, who began working on compositing the film using Flame. While on set, each half of the rig had been given one run individually to create a blank background[7] to allow The Mill to remove the rig.[8] While minimal CGI work was needed on Time Sculpture, minor modifications to details such as lighting were made using software including Baselight, Floctane, Smoke, and Autodesk Softimage.[10]