Fruit of the Loom ‘A Whole New Ballgame’

Fruit of the Loom’s “A Whole New Ballgame” is a 2014 commercial from The Richards Group featuring a digitally extended stadium and CG crowd by a52. The spot turns a real ballpark into a packed big-league venue through seamless visual effects.

SCANable provided LiDAR/3D laser scanning of LoanMart Field in Rancho Cucamonga, California, capturing the stadium as accurate 3D data. VFX studio a52 used our scans to digitally enhance and extend the ballpark and populate the stands with a computer-generated crowd — set extension and crowd placement grounded in real-world geometry.

Making a small venue read as a large one

Set extension is usually described as adding what the budget could not build. Here the job is subtler: making a real, complete, correctly proportioned ballpark read as a much larger one.

That is harder than it sounds, because a stadium’s size is communicated through proportion rather than through any single element. Tier height relative to the field, the number of rows, how far an upper deck overhangs, the apparent distance from home plate to the back of the stands — an audience judges scale from those relationships without consciously measuring anything.

Extending convincingly means starting from the real structure’s true dimensions, which is what set and location scanning provides.

Repetition is where registration error shows

Stadium architecture repeats. Identical seat rows, identical structural bays, identical railing sections, continuing for a long way in both directions.

Repetition is unforgiving. A small angular error at one scan station is invisible locally but becomes a visible misalignment fifty meters down the same row, and a digital extension built on a subtly bent structure bends along with it. Repetition also defeats image-only reconstruction, since a solver cannot reliably distinguish one identical bay from the next.

Measured registration across the whole structure is what keeps the extension straight where the real one is straight. That is the practical case for 3D laser scanning over photographic reconstruction on this kind of subject.

Exterior capture runs against the sun

An open-air venue has to be scanned in daylight, which means the lighting conditions change throughout the capture.

That affects the photographic component more than the ranging. Color and shadow shift from the first station to the last, and shadows baked into imagery captured at noon are wrong for a shot filmed at five. Capture gets sequenced accordingly, and lighting reference is gathered alongside the geometry so the CG can be lit to match the plate rather than to match the scan day.

Delivery then runs through cleanup, retopology, and texturing before anything reaches a comp.

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