Open on bikers exiting a dusty roadside diner. Suddenly, a dusty wind kicks up, money blows against the motorcyclists' boots. Ones, fives, tens, twenties and fifties. Some of the bills stick to the tailpipes, kickstands and boots. Cut to the source of the currency – camera pushes in on a man made of money filling the tank of his motorcycle (his helmet sits on the seat). While pumping gas, he shakes his hair and beard like a model in a shampoo commercial. The gas station attendant approaches. The man of money turns his body to the attendant who plucks the required cash from him. The man of money then looks at the total on the gas pump and realizes he owes another fifty cents. He raps himself lightly on one side of his head. A few coins drop from his ear into the attendant's hand. Man made of money drives off into the sunset as onlookers stare with envy.

Multiple camera test shoots were held during pre-production of the commercial to assess the newly built and custom designed RED Epic camera stereo HDR system. This dual camera system, consisting of a slightly overexposed camera to capture the video highlights and a slightly underexposed camera to capture the shadows, was designed to simultaneously shoot both components of high dynamic range video.

Upon evaluating the stereo HDR setup during pre-production, improvements were made to the system configuration to achieve optimal exposures for each camera based upon their capability to capture the greens in the costume of the Money Man. We were able to transition smoothly into production with the knowledge acquired from prior camera tests and the efforts of the video effects team and cinematographer working in tandem to capture the image in production that we would need for compositing in post.

During the post production process the two sets of over and under exposed frames were merged together to create the high dynamic range video composite that is achieved in the spot. The final video image was produced with various image processing software trials and test video renderings to evaluate the appearance of the highlights, shadows and overall color of our video format for the spot’s authentic HDR look.