Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle Pasta

I have a lot of memories about this spot. While we were working on it, Marilyn was giving birth to her wonderful daughter Sara. Even though the spot was shot on film at 24 fps, it would be edited together on videotape (at 29.97 fps). That requires a 3/2 pull down, meaning some frames get repeated on an extra field...We shot the animation on 35mm film at 24 fps and obviously shot their mats to match precisely.

Because all of this was a new technology, and everyone was used to just making a film optical to marry the two, they were trying to save money combining on tape. The 3/2 pulldown was randomly applied to the animation and the mats in the film-to-tape session.

We suggested that we combine everything at 24 fps and then expand them after combining them to 29.97.  We were ignored. And what should have been a 2 or 3-hour post production session went into the wee hours of the night trying to get everything to match. We never allowed that mistake to be made again. And then digital technology came in, and we now can exhale... maybe...