THE MILL HELPS FREDRIK BOND WITH BABY

OSCAR winning visual effects facility The Mill have worked closely with director Fredrik Bond at Harry Nash to create a baby to star in the latest VW Lupo commercial.
Shot in Prague over four days and set in a hospital, a baby called Lupo is seen to be creating havoc throughout the hospital. He then bursts through the door, pulls off the air conditioning grate, crawls through it and is chased by a frantic nurse across the hospital floor.
The main challenges facing The Mill were to make the baby look real and move on all fours at an unnaturally quick pace. Puppeteers were called in to work a puppet baby on a treadmill at about 4ft above the ground. Several plates were then shot of the hospital corridor. The flame team, Barnsley, Chris Knight and Phil Crowe, then composited the baby from the treadmill onto the live-action plates of the corridor and added reflection and shadow plates to the underneath and surrounding area of the baby. They also painted out the three puppeteers and their shadows from the shots.
A baby had been separately shot and once the desired speed and movement of the puppet baby had been achieved, the head and neck of the real baby was tracked in. The flame artists searched through the archive material of the real baby to find shots that matched up technically and artistically to the movement of the puppet.
The commercial ends with the nurse clutching the baby and the tag line - VW Lupo - Volkswagen's Tough Little Baby.
(GB)