This past winter I had a 4 month internship for a mocap company called Vitruvian Entertainment in Burbank which lasted October 2016 to February 2017, & one of the projects I worked on was an NBA commercial called "NBA Chinese New Year Envelope 2017". During the Chinese New Year it is customary to give red envelopes full of surprises to another person much like our X-mas tradition. The commercial stars NBA players James Harden, Jeremy Lin, and Stephen Curry, all rendered as paper cutouts of themselves playing basketball before they morph into their real selves at the end of the shoot.
The shoot took 1 day, and it lasted from 7 am till 6 pm at Sirheel Chestnut Studios in Burbank, and my supervisors were Irfan Merchant and Jose Navarro. During the shoot I assisted in the computer setup including camera equipment, battery chargers, & proximity markers. I also took measurements of the basketball players and entered it in the mocap application which made the mocap data more accurate. I also assisted during the fitting of the suits for the clients which meant securing any loose wires & making sure all the wireless components faced outward for the suit to be accurately read by the computers. I also constantly kept checking, replacing, & charging the batteries for the suit in order for the mocap data to be fully read. My side job was also to operate a digital camera for every take, so we could use it as reference during the mocap clean up.
The shoot had its share of problems. First the location for the shoot switched from an indoor high school gym in LA to a local studio in Burbank the day before the shoot. The location had to be examined for size requirements & wireless technology interference. Secondly, blue tooth devices from the staff corrupted the mocap readings but were quickly remedied. Third, some battery packs failed to charge, but luckily there were back up batteries on hand. Other problems were minor ones such as wireless components getting flipped due to the movement of the basketball players themselves. Despite all these setbacks, my supervisors acknowledged that this shoot was one of the most successful & least troublesome compared to previous ones.
NBA Chinese New Year Envelope 2017 commercial
Sirheel Studio stage
mocap workstation
digital camera
end of shoot
call sheet
