With a touch of class, the NFL honors its many fans with this Super Bowl commercial dedicated to the 'Best Fans Ever'. Grey NY's American Family unites many generations of football fans through a narrative featuring beloved sit-com characters spanning generations. Among the cast, favorites from Happy Days, The Dukes of Hazzard, Alf, The Brady Bunch, Seinfeld and The Office, to note only a few.
Director:
Ryan McKenna, Ben Smith
Production Company:
The Mill
Agency:
Grey
"The Mill's dedicated team produced the job end-to-end," says Senior Producer Carl Walters, with Ryan McKenna editing and Co-Head of 3D Ben Smith VFX supervising, utilizing The Mill's studio space to support simultaneous VFX and practical studio production.
In the end, American Family is seamlessly entertaining. The production itself was intricate, involving low-res sourced footage that made lens analysis and tracking tricky. Cloth work was challenging because the team had to exactly match preexisting character movement. Footage that was shot cleanly had to look like it was ripped from a DVD, which entailed replicating compression artifacts and applying them to the new footage. The team filmed dozens of elements and composited them into scenes; leveraging a software application to mix/overlay while shooting to ensure distance and perspective were true to the sourced footage that each element was meant to match.
Congratulations to everyone involved in the creation of American Family. It was honored in the Product Placement category of the 2011 AICP Next Awards.
Agency: GreyProducer: Alison Horn
Creative Director: Eric Segal, Lars Jorgensen, Martin Peters (Associate Creative Director)
Creatives: Doug Fallon, Lu Romero, Zack Menna, Rich Singer, Steven Fogel
Production Company: The Mill
Directors: Ryan McKenna and Ben Smith
Executive Producer: Adam Isidore
Producer: Carl Walters
Editing Company: The Mill
Editor: Ryan McKenna
Edit Assist: Jonathon Rippon
VFX & Design: The Mill
Executive Producer: Adam Isidore
VFX Producer: Carl Walters
Shoot Supervisor: Alex Maxwell
Creative Directors: Ryan McKenna, Ben Smith
2D Lead Artists: Stefan Smith, Adam Grint
3D Lead Artist: Ben Smith
2D Artists: Antoine Douadi, Dexter Davey, Doug Purver, Mario Caserta, David Munoz, Francois Turquety, and Keith Sullivan
3D Artists: Thomas Bardwell, Naotaka Minami, Santosh Sailesh, Jeff Lopez, Joshua Merck, Hassan Taimur, Ohad Bracha, Vanes Lambert, Michael Marsek, Peter Devlin, Wyatt Savarese, Tom Cushwa, Mitch Deodes, Myung Lee, Navdeep Singh, Piotr Glabinsiki, Timothy Kim, Jina Lee, David Bernkopf
Assist: Randall Krueger
Motion Graphics: Lucas Bell
Production Coordinators: Colin Blaney, Trevor Rager