Hey, what are they doing to Elvis here? There was no narrative in the You Tube video containing this shot, so we don’t know the technical details. What we do know is that some Brazilian digital engineers took Elvis images from the movie Spinout to use in a TV commercial.
That commercial was for fashion retailer C&A, which operates in Europe and Brazil, but not the United States.
The ad is a fast-paced 30-second look at Elvis singing and kissing girls at a modern-day party. The video’s director created a set and filmed beautiful people dancing and talking. Then his digital team extracted Elvis’ image from the Spinout sequence where he sings the song “Smorgasbord” and placed him in the middle of the modern party. The footage of Elvis came from this:
And ended up like this. Keep in mind that this was not just a single image transfer. It was several seconds of Elvis doing some classic moves.
Several other snippets from the song were lifted and placed in the modern setting.
Elvis enjoys a lot of fast kisses while he sings “Smorgasbord,” and all of them are transferred to other girls in the ad video.
Here’s a shot from the footage they shot before Elvis was added to the scene. Each girl had to pose for their air-kiss with the right timing to match Elvis’ movements in the film.
A bit later, Elvis ditches the guitar, strolls over to two standing girls and kisses them on the cheek.
Here’s a shot of the two party girls before Elvis kisses them. Notice that they are dancing on a bench.
Then the images of Elvis jumping up between them on that bench are added.
The footage of Elvis doing this spin-around jump came from a different segment of the movie.
It looks like they flipped it from left-to-right for some reason.
The last kiss in the commercial is between Elvis and a beauty in a white dress.
Here’s the footage of Elvis kissing Deborah Walley in Spinout.
After a little digital trickery, the kiss looks like this.
Check out how they posed the girl for the kiss.
Now that virtual/digital/holograph technology has advanced so much, I think we will be seeing much more of Elvis in contemporary media. That prospect will probably rankle some folks, but it’s fine with me. The more Elvis the better.
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