02/07/10 - It's hard to describe how excited Twins fans are about their new outdoor stadium, Target Field.  To capture that momentum, the Twins and creative agency Periscope teamed with Gasket Studios to create something special to promote it.  Gasket was charged with bringing to life a unique part of Twins history in the new venue. The new stadium features the original Twins logo baseball characters "Minnie" and "Paul" (for Minneapolis and St Paul cities), straddling the Mississippi river. A giant sign holds these animatronic figures that shake hands every time the Twins hit a home run.  In the spot, Minnie and Paul warm up their handshake for the new season. Using a versatile combination of 3D character animation, 3D ballpark recreations, visual effects and high resolution photography, Gasket captured the exciting potential of outdoor baseball.  The premiered in the upper midwest during the 2010 Superbowl.

These are stills from the final piece. Combined with some interesting angles and fluid and funny movements from our Minnie and Paul, just the right amount of humor was added to the piece.

Gasket shot the plates for the commercial at Target Field back in November 2009 .  It was a lovely fall day, right before our first snow.  Our challenge was to take this scene and make it a bright spring day, ripe for an outdoor baseball game at the new stadium.  The field was still under construction.  Signage, flags and advertising were not yet in place. These two shots illustrate our start point and our end point with this project. We shot high resolution stills of the field that we stitched together in 3D and effected in Flame.  Our retouched field was also used in print ads and appears on the tickets for this season.

Since the sign is real, we needed to recreate it so that Minnie and Paul could come to life. Then we erased the sign from all of our footage. A 3D model of the sign gave us the most versatility, allowing us to choose dramatic camera angles. The above images represent a rendered and wire frame of the our 3D sign without the characters in place.

 
Minnie and Paul have evolved a bit over the years, and it was a privilege to work with their likenesses for this project. The first logo on the left appeared in 1961.  
 

Here's the before-and-after of the sign. The top image is from the photo shoot and the image beneath it is our rebuilt 3D sign from the final spot.

For the shoot itself, we felt privileged to be allowed onto the glorious new field to get the best possible shots for the commercial.
  

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