Golden Square make it one sided for Sky HD
The inherent problem of how to advertise HD to PAL viewers is cleverly tackled on this occasion with the removal of a whole football team. Flame artist Harry Jarman painted out all of the Manchester United team enabling them to score a goal without a boot ever contacting a ball.
Harry Jarman explained “The creatives at WCRS came to us with the idea of removing a whole team from the coverage of one of Sky's HD football matches, implying that, if you aren't watching the match in HD then you're missing something. We had initial discussions about what sort of footage would work well, trying to avoid any overly complex reconstruction of players hidden behind removed opposition.
Working from HD footage we were able to track most wide shots and replace the players with grass where necessary. Close-ups proved more difficult to track with relatively little to reference the camera movement, in these shots the grass had to be tracked in manually. Since the chosen match was floodlit, we had to rebuild and track multiple shadows for each player where they went near removed players.
Clean grass plates were created by taking selected frames from each sequence and carefully retouching out all the players, these could be tracked back into the footage in order to create a playerless pitch.
Finally, we rebuilt parts of players where they crossed each other and restored the ball and its shadows behind the removed players.”