Man fashion jeans

Levi's Red Tab Jeans get racy with "Invisible Man."

TBWA/Chiat/Day, Dir. Michael Bay, Digital Domain Explore The Power Of Sight Unseen.

No, it's not an episode of the erotic Red Shoe Diaries cable series. But "Invisible Man," a spot for Levi's Red Tab Jeans via TBWA/Chiat/Day, Los Angeles and San Francisco, is definitely risque for a commercial depicting a male-female love (lust) story.

Intriguingly, it is an invisible male and female - courtesy of Venice, Calif.-based effects house Digital Domain - that are featured in the :60 spot, directed by Michael Bay of bicoastal! international Propaganda Films. Set to Marvin Gaye's classic "Let's Get It On," the ad consists mostly of foreplay up until the "anticlimatic" ending.

The spot is set at night in a man's loft apartment, and begins as the invisible guy - wearing Levi's jeans - is interrupted from watching sports on TV by a doorbell. He gets up, knocks a couple of glasses over, grabs a shirt and tries to clean the place up a bit while his dog looks on curiously. The invisible man unlocks the door to reveal his invisible date - a very shapely form wearing a denim jacket, a tight, short sweater and Levi's jeans. The two proceed to playfully romp around the apartment. She straddles him on the kitchen sink, and in the next sequence, he dips her deeply while dancing. After this romantic pas de deux, the invisible couple wrestle on the couch. She strips off her top (her cast-off sweater lands on the guy's invisible head) and then her jeans, followed by shot of the dog covering his eyes with his paw.

The female, now visible only by her red shoes, walks into his bedroom. The guy frantically shucks off his clothes to follow her. But the love play is interrupted by the doorbell. Clad only in socks, the guy scoots to answer it. On the other side is an invisible matronly figure wearing a hat and glasses. "Mom!" the guy cries in dismay. The end super: "Opt. For the original."

TBWA/Chiat/Day creative director Rob Siltanen, who also wrote the spot, explained that while he was trying to come up with a concept, he started doodling a pair of pants. "I thought it might be kind of interesting if these pants started moving, which gave me the idea of an invisible man," said Siltanen. "One of the things I liked about it was the fact [that] I could do a few things I wouldn't be allowed to otherwise on television, like take his clothes off."

The other advantage of using an invisible man, continued Siltanen, was the potential to broaden the target audience. "Levi's had done an earlier campaign that was very targeted to young people," said Siltanen, "but [there are] also people in that age group who are deserting to other brands. The invisibility allows just about anybody to put themselves in those pants."

Bay told SHOOT that he liked the concept of the spot, which he directed using real actors wearing the clothes over green bodystockings. "I thought it [would be] unpredictable because there was no emotion in it," said Bay. "It's one of those spots where it's a gamble; it could be very cool or it could suck. ... [When] you don't have emotion - you don't have the eyes to look at or the facial expressions - it kind of takes away the human interest. So ... we had to get very animated people."

While "Invisible Man" does stretch the boundaries of what has typically been allowed in commercials by virtue of the fact that the people are invisible, Bay noted that some of the seemingly innocuous shots raised agency concern. Added Bay, "There were conversations like, 'You can't have the dog on the bed if they're going to fuck.'"

Bay's DP John Schwartzman (also DP for Bay's feature films The Rock and Armageddon) operated a motion control camera system which was "a pain" to move for each shot, said Bay. He added, "We had to do about four passes for each shot; if you wanted three takes, you had to do four passes for each take. And with this agency, they couldn't decide on anything: [We]'d do twenty-five shots to get one."

According to Bay, it was a rather disorganized shoot; the agency, he claimed, was undecided on the spot's ending, which led to the shooting of four different versions. Siltanen affirmed that they did have several endings they wanted to try - including one they had wanted to use in a PSA, in which the dog pulls a condom packet out of the guy's jeans. But ultimately, the "mom" ending - which was Bay's recommendation - worked best for the spot, said Siltanen.

Digital Domain's Fred Raimondi, the job's visual effects supervisor, explained that his team used a combination of traditional 2-D and "new" 3-D invisible man techniques. "One of the traditional technical techniques is to dress people in green and fill in the background where their heads would be, and we'd have to fill in the backs of the clothing as well. We didn't use the green in hopes of pulling a greenscreen; it was more for the fact that it was a day-glo green and would show us where we needed to rotoscope. So we ended up rotoscoping each shot."

Two invisible people touching presented a tricky technical challenge, said Raimondi. The problem is that with two green-body-stockinged heads in close proximity, as well as intertwined arms and legs, there were instances in which a hand would cover a piece of clothing that needed to be visible. In those cases, CG clothes were created to fill in the gaps. The result worked "like gangbusters," said Raimondi.

Following the two-day shoot, during which 22 motion control set-ups were done, the spot entered a five-week post phase. "You only do a few jobs in your career where you don't wish you could go back and fix something," said Raimondi. "This was one of those jobs; I was very happy with everything."

TOP SPOT OF THE WEEK

CLIENT

Levi Strauss & Co./Levi's Red Tab Jeans

PRODUCTION CO.

Propaganda Films, bicoastal/international. Michael Bay, director; John Schwartzman, DP; Colin Hickson, VP/commercials division; Roger Zorovich, executive producer; Karen Rohrbacher, producer. Shot at Sony Pictures Studios, Culver City, Calif.

AGENCY

TBWA/Chiat/Day, Los Angeles and San Francisco. Lee Clow, creative director/art director; Rob Siltanen, creative director/copywriter; Duncan Milner, art director; Jennifer Golub, executive producer; Brooke Bowman, assistant producer.

EDITORIAL

Nomand Editing Company, Santa Monica. John Murray, editor; David Anderson, assistant editor.

POST

Digital Domain, Venice, Calif. Scott Rader, online editor. Company 3, Santa Monica. Stefan Sonnenfeld, colorist.

VISUAL EFFECTS

Digital Domain, Venice, Calif. Fred Raimondi, visual effects supervisor; Todd Isroelit, visual effects producer; Allyse Manoff, visual effects coordinator; Bernd Angerer, animation supervisor; Scott Rader, digital effects supervisor/lead compositor; Michael Karp, motion control supervisor.

AUDIO POST

POP Sound, Santa Monica. Loren Silber, mixer.