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Visual effects artist Rick Schreck was called on for image enhancement for the project. The commercials have a smooth, simple-yet-elegant feel and Parker’s appearance paralleled this subtle beauty.
According to Schreck, correction passes were performed after the transfer process to treat different areas. “In this case, one pass worked great for everything but the hair,” he says, “so they did an additional pass for that. We were responsible for smoothing things out and recapturing that rich, sumptuous look the clients were going for. It's a pretty straightforward process when she is just looking into the camera, but in some of the scenes she is moving and spinning around, which makes it trickier. "
A third telecine pass was completed for Parker's eyes for the same reason a second pass was done for her hair. The correction looked good for a majority of the elements in the scene, but her eyes didn't have quiet enough color. Schreck composited three layers — hair, eyes, and everything else — into several scenes.
Working with Discreet Flame, Schreck went over Parker's image, paying attention to the finest details. Extra contrast was eliminated using defocus filtering together with color correction to restore and enhance the rich textures and hues. This procedure proved to be the most difficult, as it involved several compositing techniques on several layers, all of which had to be motion tracked.
"A lot of the work was in isolating problem areas," explains Schreck. "On beauty jobs like this one, there are often hair fly-aways, small lines or too much make-up under people's eyes. The toughest part is working on the skin. Using filters to defocus the area a bit, we can reduce those imperfections and still keep everything looking natural."
In certain poses, Parker’s muscle definition was highlighted so much that a variety of compositing techniques were required to maintain a desired softer appearance.
All of the fixes were achieved using Discreet Flame software running on an SGI Tezro workstation.