In days gone by, you could spot an on-screen visual effect or computer-generated image a mile off. But, as two new commercials for the mobile phone company 02 ably demonstrate, it is becoming increasingly difficult to tell where reality ends and illusion begins. Digital technology and the deft interweaving of live action shots and CGI into composite scenes in commercials and feature films has reached a point where as, John Lennon once put it, "Nothing is real". If the client doesn't like the sky in one scene, or the trees in another, you can change them. But when the client, as in this case, wants an impossible, yet convincing cityscape as seen from the cockpit of an airborne helicopter and he or she wants it finished and ready to air in three weeks flat, that still takes a fair bit of processing power and a team willing to work day and night to get the job done.
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