Sometimes, success can work against you. Founded in 1985, Qualcomm has grown into a leading developer of wireless-telecommunications research and development. But its reputation is that of a Goliath that only exploits the ideas and discoveries of clever Davids. So the San Diego-based company enlisted Atmosphere BBDO, a digital-marketing agency based in New York, to create a "Who We Are" section on its Web site to change public perception and show how its innovations affect the average person's daily life.

BBDO's creative execution was centered on tilt-shift photography, a technique by which images are shot from above with special lenses for controlling the plane of focus and creating an ultra-shallow depth of field. Making the world look like a dollhouse miniature, tilt-shift images toy with one's perception of reality while heightening it. In the case of Qualcomm.com's "Who We Are" section, visitors have an overhead view of a sunny, verdant park dotted with clusters of people. It's all softly blurred, but as you move your cursor over a tableau, various characters come into focus. A young woman is writing in her journal. Two boys are kicking a soccer ball. A family is picnicking. And so on.

At this point, the images are all stills. But hold your cursor on one of them, and they animate into action—suddenly the boys are passing the ball back and forth, for example. A panel of text partially overlaying the image extols Qualcomm's virtues. All the while, an electronica soundtrack plays, with various changes of instrumentation each time a different video clip is activated.

As straightforward as it appears on the Web site, the project actually entailed a great deal of coordinating among numerous disciplines: photography, video, music and interactive. Having determined how the project would look and feel, creative director Cyrus Vantoch-Wood corralled the different teams together for a series of preproduction meetings, during which everyone could work out what they needed in order to complete their contribution to the project and coordinate their efforts with the other teams.

"I slightly dictated how I thought it should work, but I learned pretty quickly that you can't really get away with that when you have this many different agencies," says Vantoch-Wood, who estimates that out of the six to seven weeks dedicated to producing the project, 50 percent consisted of planning.

Vantoch-Wood first admired tilt-shift photography two years ago, when he saw that a World Press Photo winner had used the technique to shoot a series of sporting events. "It looked incredibly realistic," says Vantoch-Wood, who then waited for the right brief to try it out. Qualcomm was it. "Wireless technology makes the world a smaller space, and this is an incredibly direct metaphor that gets that across," he says.

Finding a professional photographer who could carry it off was not easy, though. Tilt-shift photography is largely the experimental purview of avid hobbyists. Eventually, Vincent Laforet's name came up in Vantoch-Wood's conversations with various art buyers. Laforet, a Pulitzer-Prize–winning commercial and editorial photographer, has been shooting tilt-shift photography for the past two years, notably of sporting events for The New York Times.

Vantoch-Wood called Laforet in for a meeting, and the creative director knew he'd found his man. "I saw straightaway that he's a bit of a geek. That obviously means he has an obsession for detail," says Vantoch-Wood.

"Doing tilt-shift photography is not intuitive," notes Laforet. The process involves using a special tilt-shift lens—also referred to as perspective correction or perspective control lenses—that enables the photographer to manipulate the optical elements of the lens in relation to the sensor's plane. "Making it work requires a lot of practice in finding the right angle, lens and distance."

The plan was that they would shoot at a grassy park somewhere in San Francisco or Los Angeles. They needed a setting that provided a full frame of green with something in the background and foreground, such as trees and benches, to give it three-dimensionality. Laforet oversaw the scouting, working with producer John Kent. Because they needed to find a location that would look right from above, they used Google Earth. Laforet also shipped Kent a tilt-shift lens and instructed him to shoot from an elevated angle so he and the client could accurately assess the location.

They chose to shoot in two parks in San Francisco—a grassy one for the "Who We Are" section and a plaza-like one for a section of the Web site called "Innovation." Vantoch-Wood and Laforet, equipped with a Canon EOS 1Ds MKIII, 24mm and 45mm T/S lenses and his laptop, stationed themselves in a cherry picker roughly 80 feet above the ground. They threw a tape measure down to a placeholder (a white square) on the ground where one of the groups of actors was meant to stand (shot exclusively in video back in New York, they'd be incorporated at a later stage) and recorded the angles, using basic trigonometry. Laforet then shot a berth of frames—10 to 15—at one focal length, then changed focal lengths and shot another set, so that the post-production team could composite a scene that comes into focus at various places as viewers move a computer cursor across it.

Meanwhile, down on the ground, inside a digital truck housing two 30-inch monitors and a RAID (an array of disk drives), art director Justin Edwards and the client were monitoring the shoot. Laforet's camera was hooked up to a computer in the truck via an Ethernet cable, while a second cable went from that computer to Laforet's laptop. The photographer used Apple Remote Desktop to browse the art director's screen.

"So even though I'm shooting the picture," explains Laforet, "I'm never looking at them in my camera. I'm looking at them in my monitor live with [the art director and client]. It was very high-tech." Then he delivered the images, along with 3-D graphs containing precise measurements, on a DVD, so that the video team could complete the next step.

To match Laforet's angles exactly, the video team had two choices: either find a studio with ceilings high enough to shoot from 80 feet up, or mathematically reduce the angles so that they could replicate what he did but from a lower height. They chose the latter. That wasn't all they had to match up. They positioned the actors on artificial grass and took multiple close-ups of them to ensure that online, when a visitor zooms in on the grass, it and the shadows look realistic. A BBDO internal post-production crew also rotoscoped the actors, a common practice when compositing a live-action element on a plate or image.

Bajibot, a New York–based production facility specializing in 3-D animation, video production interactive design and CGI graphics, handled the next stage: assembling the plates, video and music into one interactive piece. The music was conceived by New York music-production company Pulse Music, whose job was to compose a soundtrack that could be looped but would also echo one of the overall messages of the project: that when all the different elements of Qualcomm's identity come together, a symphony is created.

Vantoch-Wood says the client was thrilled with the results, which went live this past summer, and jokes that they are "threatening" to commission future projects. Referring to the project as a "first experiment in this space," he'd clearly be pleased to see what else he could achieve with tilt-shift photography. Meanwhile, Laforet has been polishing his video skills, which will make him capable of seeing another interactive project through its two essential stages. "I think we can take this further when we work together again," Vantoch-Wood says of the photographer. "Which I'm sure we will."
 
Related link
See the Qualcomm web site in action