Stopp has created the 80’s style visual effects for the latest SBAB spot directed by Jesper Kouthoofd for advertising agency LeBureau. SBAB is a leading player in the mortgage industry and financial services sector. It wants to simplify and challenge the way customers choose and buy a mortgage.

The spot aims to promote this by showing the problems one can face when choosing the wrong mortgage lender. It features a woman watching TV in the comfort of her home and this calm scene is disrupted by a purple ghost appearing, causing havoc and eating her money. The ghost represents the many ‘too good to be true’ offers that are regularly promoted by some mortgage lenders.

Director Kouthoofd has worked extensively at Stopp recently and knew they could deliver the 80’s film look he wanted. Stopp’s Johan Boije and Peter Marin watched the old Ghostbusters films and studied early copies of Cinefex to ensure authenticity and recreated number of techniques used in the 80’s. Boije comments, “It’s fun to see the effects that you remembered to be really cool, now they seem to be quite crude. At that time digital effects were limited and a lot of effects were optical or solved ‘in camera’”. Kouthoofd chose to build the monster as a real model and not in 3D because that is how they did it in the 80’s. It had a puppeteer controlling it from inside. This was filmed against black and then composited with a simple additive lumakey and a touch of glow on top of that.

More work was done on the two miniature models. Boije had to do sky replacements as Kouthoofd wanted the first to have a twilight look and the other a late at night one. They added tree branches in the foreground and time warped the original smoke to make it look more realistic. A flock of birds was made out of particles in the first shot and some bats in the other one. The letter that flies across the sky in the first shot was animated in XSI by Stefan Andersson from Stopp’s 3D department. Johan Boije and Peter Marin removed the wires that controlled the small model cars and added beams to the headlights and tracked the SBAB logo to the side of the car. Smoke generated in 3D by Arvid Björn was also added to the skidding car.

Boije tried a lot of different solutions for the capturing of the ghost sequence. Preproduction tests were carried out and the idea of sucking the ghost up like a vacuum cleaner was derived at. Boije said, “We tested different approaches on the sucking effect with particles done in 3D, various displacement effects etc. But it all looked too high-end and digital. So it ended up with simple glows and flares. The monster itself was painted and hand warped in Shake. To add to the effect we made some objects fly through the air like being pulled by the force of gravity from the ‘proton-pack’”. All effects were finished in Autodesk Flint, AfterEffects and Shake.