Volvo Bull Run

Twentyfive very real bulls chasing a truck

May, 2013

While the "epic split" with Jean-Claude van Damme is the one that's best known, Swedish ad agency Forsman & Bodenfors ran a long series of elaborate stunts to highlight the various capabilities of Volvo trucks. The split shows two trucks reversing with extreme precision, and here they wanted to highlight an unusually nimble ability to navigate tight spaces with speed and precision. The shoot was done in Ciudad Rodrigo in Spain, with the entire city center blocked off for 3 days.

We knew GoPro's wouldn't be a reliable solution here and since the target was still web and not an HMD, we went with a LadyBug 3 camera courtesy of Immersive Media. Myself and their operator handled the shoot, which was wedged into an enormous production for the regular film: 360 was clearly not the priority back then.

This shoot had problematic vibrations, extreme dynamic range due to harsh sunlight and deep shadows in the tight alleys. The LadyBug 3 only does 15 fps so we interpolated that to 30 in post. Its single chassis build ensured individual lenses didn't vibrate, something that is a common problem with even the sturdiest GoPro mounts.

While it's small, the camera still has parallax and the constant movement plus wildly shifting distances gave us plenty of ghosting. The solution I came up with was to run stitches at multiple radii and then mask in the layer that had the least artifacts, aligning our masks with naturally occurring lines in the picture, like edges of houses. For 5 minutes of footage, this was completed in a single day, and gave a very early taste of how auto stitching can be used effectively.

Our colorist made a truly heroic effort recovering detail from the deep shadows of the footage, while closely matching the rather heavily processed grade chosen for the regular film version.

In the implementation, ad agency and production vendor opted to crop the footage to only allow horizontal panning, but apart from the well known pentagonal nadir hole for the LadyBug 3, our footage was fully spherical.