Orange the Ride Blink Productions

Working with Simon and his team is always a pleasure as he is so forward thinking and adaptable to anything you throw at him. On the shoot he is a calm steadying influence keeping things simple so as not to throw or sidetrack the main purpose of the shoot.

Matt Fone, Producer, Blink Productions

Dougal Wilson and Producer, Matthew Fone, from Blink Productions needed to make a bike appear to have a life of its own for Oranges new spot The Ride.

The script called for a nondescript bicycle to go for a joy ride in the dead of night. The bike rolls slowly from its resting place to the street, looks left and right and then slips onto the road. It cruises along weaving from side to side, bunny hops onto a kerb and down again and loops the loop in a deserted car park. In short, the bike needed to have a life of its own.

When Dougal and Matthew approached our creative designers they had already decided that they wanted to achieve as much as possible in camera.

We decided the most practical approach was to treat the bike as a kind of puppet. Our special effects technicians designed a system of jointed rods, which connected the bike to an operator who ran along behind the bike performing most of the intricate, slow speed moves by hand.

Some of the shots required the bike to move more quickly than our operator could run whilst maintaining good control over the bike. To solve this we adapted a quad bike to take an operator sitting on either the front or back. The rod system was then reconfigured to work from the side or rear at speeds up to approx. 20Kph.

The rods were removed in post production.

Artem SFX Designer/Supervisor, Simon Tayler, comments:

Working with Dougal is always a pleasure as he is both highly creative and extremely thorough. With this in mind we decided to also build a remote control bike just in case there were any shots we could not cover with our puppet bikes. In the end it got used in just one shot.

Industry

• Commercials

Discipline

• Animation & Puppets
• Animatronics
• Mechanical Rigs
• Visual Effects Elements

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