Brickyard VFX Scores an Ace for Titleist's "Leadership 2011" Campaign

California, Artist owned-and-operated bi-coastal effects boutique Brickyard VFX recently completed work on their third consecutive Titleist campaign via Arnold Worldwide. The "Leadership 2011" campaign includes nine spots, which are all currently airing to coincide with the PGA and LPGA tours. Brickyard provided visual effects, finishing and beauty work for the campaign directed by Greg Kohs of @radical.media.

"Stats" showcases the technical side of golf through graphical representations of real-time golf game data, including drive accuracy, sand saves, ball strikes, approach accuracy, greens in regulation and proximity to hole. Brickyard collaborated with Arnold from the very beginning, and the team was heavily involved in the design and look development process.

Another challenge came on "Split Second," which shows - in slow motion - what happens to a Titleist golf ball as it is hit. Senior VFX Producer Amy Appleton explains, "We shot a reference on a Photron camera running at 30,000 frames per second. This camera shoots a very compressed image; much too small for broadcast. Brickyard's task was to take the broadcast quality Phantom shot and composite all the elements to convey exactly what happens to a Titleist ball when the club makes contact."

Brickyard also created the end tags from stills of the Titleist print campaign. Through the use of geometry, the team was able to map and project the Titleist balls and packaging into a photoreal, 3D space. They then lit and animated the packages, including animating the holograms on the boxes.

The Brickyard team was tasked with working across various footage formats used on the nine spots, and bringing everything together into one unified campaign. "The footage for this campaign was shot on many different formats: 35mm film, RED, Phantom and the Canon 5D," says Appleton. "Through beauty work, we were able to take these different formats and achieve a clean, consistent look." Despite the challenges and volume of material for all nine spots, Brickyard was able to deliver everything in just 1.5 weeks.