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Geoff Boyle: LEGO ad cinematographer extraordinaire


Ayliffe
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So I was reading a completely unrelated article about 90's SEGA ads in the UK, and it mentioned that a cinematographer called Geoff Boyle had worked on ads for a ton 'o companies, including Lego. Had a quick google, and it turns out that he's done quite a bit of work for TLG and documented it all on his website. Here's some of the highlights I could spot:

 

Adventurers Ad (the one with the kid becoming Johnny Thunder):

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This was the largest SFX shoot I'd done up till then.

We had 2 MoCo units and 60 odd feet of greenscreen, every shot was a composite, most multiple composites with one shot being made up of 45 elements.

We had to scale the boy down to match the size of the Lego models, this worked out to be 29.73 to 1 (roughly), so for every 6 inches that we tracked on the model set we had to track about 15 feet on the greenscreen with the boy.


We had so many shots to do that we built 2 identical model sets, each with it's own MoCo, we also had the large greenscreen mentioned earlier, a smaller greenscreen set for his CU's and, of course, a 435 on the set of his bedroom.


It was lit totally with HMI's and shot with Vision 250, the lighting level was fairly high as we wanted to keep the feel of a real exterior shoot which meant shooting at T11. This was difficult at times as we were shooting at up to 150fps. In fact on some of the high speed close ups we got to melting point, with smoke coming off the set.

 

 

Technic Ad (the one with the wind tunnel):

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I was involved in this from the very beginning and was able to work with the art director to build most of the lighting into the set.


The model tunnel was about 20 feet long and about 15 inches wide


About 300 feet of architectural tube lighting was built into the set and 4 Goya's were used to add shafts of light from the side.

To get a small amount of smoke into the tunnel meant that the studio had to be so smoked up that a person standing 6 feet away was invisible, this was because the heat of the tubes built into the tunnel caused a convection effect that removed the smoke from inside the tunnel!


We shot with Primetime and a 435, our grip made us a tiny spring mounted dolly so that we could track the camera through the tunnel.

The camera and model were moved at a constant speed and the impression of acceleration and speed was created by varying the camera's speed with the WLCC program.


We used the 10mm Zeiss extensively for this shoot, with Nikon lenses being used on the BNC we used for the building sequence.

 

 

2000's-ish Racers Ad (referred to as "Lego Racers 3" on his site for some reason?):

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A difficult one to put still up for, the spot depends on motion for you to see the images!

One thing that was different about this shoot is that it's the first time that I've wanted to get, and actually did takeaway, the product.

No, not for kids, for me!


It's about what the Racers get up to behind the security guards back after the store closes and the lights go out.

We had 2 nights in Illums in Copenhagen to shoot this, we got in at 8pm and had to be out by 6am.

There were a lot of areas that were still alarmed whilst we were in there and this meant that it was difficult to get light into some of the more remote corners!

All lights had to be de-rigged and then re-rigged.


Once again we used the Revolution lens using a third control motor so that we could tilt the image during takes, we could then roll lean the image as we went around corners.


As always with the Revolution I found myself struggling for light, especially as I'd decided to use a very intense blue gel on most of the lights and that took away 2 stops on it's own :-(

It's shot on 5218 and the latitude of this stock really helped us out with shots that tracked through dark shadows and extreme highlights Norman managed to contain it in the sections that we wanted.

 

(guessing this one partly inspired/was inspired by Supersonic RC?)

 

There's bunch more on his site, so I'd definitely recommend having a look yourselves since some of it is actually really interesting. Also here's a link to that article about the UK SEGA ads he did since it's actually quite a nice read too.

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Wow, awesome find! These are all solid commercials he worked on and I can see his artistic fingerprints across them.

 

I wonder if referring to the line as Racers 3 is some vestigial internal thing that acknowledges how the Drome Racers toyline went with the third Lego Racers game (it was called LR3 in development, after all). That or maybe it was the third Racers spot he worked on? 

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