Dougal Wilson and Producer, Matthew Fone, from Blink Productions needed to make a bike appear to have a life of its own for Orange’s new spot “The Ride”.

The script called for a nondescript bicycle to go for a joy ride in the dead of night.  The bike rolls slowly from its resting place to the street, looks left and right and then slips onto the road.  It cruises along weaving from side to side, bunny hops onto a kerb and down again and loops the loop in a deserted car park.  In short, the bike needed to have a life of its own.

When Dougal and Matthew approached us they had already decided that they wanted to achieve as much as possible in camera.

We decided the most practical approach was to treat the bike as a kind of puppet.  We designed a system of jointed rods, which connected the bike to an operator who ran along behind the bike performing most of the intricate, slow speed moves by hand.

Some of the shots required the bike to move more quickly than our operator could run whilst maintaining good control over the bike.  To solve this we adapted a quad bike to take an operator sitting on either the front or back.  The rod system was then reconfigured to work from the side or rear at speeds up to approx. 20Kph.

The rods were removed in post production.

Artem SFX Designer/Supervisor, Simon Tayler, comments:

“Working with Dougal is always a pleasure as he is both highly creative and extremely thorough.  With this in mind we decided to also build a remote control bike just in case there were any shots we could not cover with our puppet bikes. In the end it got used in just one shot.

The hero bike itself had to look very normal, quite well used, maybe a little knocked about and generic.  We needed 3 identical bikes, plus an extra one for a concurrent stills shoot.  This involved carrying out a subtle restyling of the frames and a re-spray together with dressing each bike with accessories.

The shoot was spread over two nights on location in south London. Everything went according to plan despite loosing one entire night due to incessant rain and having to re-mount a day later.  It was a great job to work on.”

The spot ends with the voiceover “It’s great when you’re free to enjoy yourself.”

To view the spot click here