BBC captures the fall of the Berlin Wall.

To depict the BBC’s all-encompassing coverage of world events, the collapse of the Berlin Wall was chosen as the subject of this commercial. A young man leaves his house and travels through the streets of East Berlin to join a crowd busy destroying the wall. Because the commercial was shot in 2001, East Berlin has lost a lot of what made it look like it did. Practically every shot of the commercial required visual effects work for this reason.

An existing section of the wall was used for the commercial but this did not extend off camera and the guard towers no longer were in place. I extended the wall and created new guard towers using a combination of shot elements and elements I painted in Inferno.

Graffiti and commercial advertising did not exist in East Berlin before the collapse. Now it’s everywhere and as a result almost every shot in the commercial required that I remove graffiti and billboards. Walter’s documentary style requires a lot of hand held camera work which made this task more difficult. Other effects work included creating a massive crowd, adding graffiti to the wall on the West side, and multiple composition changes involving moving and adding of buildings.