The Jersey Demo
Based on a popular children's book, The Jersey is Tommy Lynch's Disney channel series in which ordinary kids literally become their sports heroes.
The parameters were elaborate. The Jersey would start to glow, Time would slow down for the world surrounding the jumper. A wormhole would form in the distance, distorting the background. The jumper would be violently pulled into the wormhole.
The reverse would happen at the destination, usually a sports event. Time slows down, a wormhole forms with the distortion and then the jumper flies into the athlete, whose image then morphs into the kid who's now inside the sports star.
This happened twice in almost every episode, because the kid usually had to come back into his or her own world, flying in from the wormhole.
Each slow motion moment was to be as active as the story would allow, usually a stunt was contrived to happen at the moment of the jump -- spilling something, knocking something, kids or dog leaping.
After a period of intense R&D exploring various avenues, I came up with a post-production CG solution that enabled the production to shoot 16mm plates, normal frame rate, and no blue screens. By combining tile plates and full CG characters built for each show with re-timed multiple composites, a streamlined production system was designed to generate hundreds of complex shots for the 68-episode series.
As time went on, the Jersey took on a life of its own and more kids went jumping at any given time. In this episode, the Jersey leaped on the kids while they watched the Superbowl, jumping them all into the game as football players.
At one point, to clarify to some new producers the 2nd season, I did a series of screen grabs to show them how the effects were being done. Click on the image to see them.
The music track Does Anyone Know About This? sung by Martha Tilton with Paul Weston and his orchestra is on the Capitol Vault series by Billy Vera. Aside from enjoying the song so much, I was intrigued because it was unreleased until it came out on this CD compilation in 1997