Wyoming Innovation Creates A Commercial For Sheridan

Wyoming Innovation is proud to announce that we have created a 30 second television commercial for the Sheridan Board of Tourism. The commercial entitled “Old West to Snow West” utilized and emphasized the Big Horn Mountain’s stunning beauty. By using advanced postproduction techniques, Wyoming Innovation was able to make a man and a woman on horseback leap off a 200-foot cliff and morph into snowmobiles right before the viewer’s eye. Click the play button below to watch the video

Wyoming Innovation was contracted by Val Burgess of the Burgess Design Group to create a commercial for Sheridan’s Board of Tourism. They needed a cost effective television commercial that had the quality to be shown on a national scale. The original concept developed by Wyoming Innovation had a large car chase sequence through a big city that paired several police vehicles against a group of roughriders on horseback who eluded the pursuing police by morphing into snowmobiles and riding to freedom in the Bighorn Mountains. Although we were fully capable of producing this concept, it was deemed too expensive. We retooled the concept to include one major special effect that would grab the audience’s attention. The concept sets two riders in an ambiguous historical western timeframe, riding horseback through the fresh untracked powder of the Big Horns. They suddenly come upon a 200-foot cliff. The man is at first hesitant and turns back. The woman gives a smile and a wink and jumps her horse off the 200-foot cliff and miraculously morphs into a snowmobile. He follows suit and they both land in a large swath of fresh powder. There are various action shots of snowmobile stunts as the voice over entices viewers to visit Sheridan’s Tourism website.To create this spot, we turned to Steve and Jana Gregersen, who have provided horse wrangling services for Wyoming Innovation for more than two years, to play the man and the woman. Their performances were filmed on a ranch in the foothills of the Big Horns in a flat snowy pasture. The next piece of the puzzle was to get the footage needed for the morph sequence. This was done at the Colts Unlimited facility in Sheridan. Charley Carroll, who has done big movie stunts before (Thirteenth Warrior) and his wife Hillary, jumped two horses in front of a 30 foot green screen we set up in their indoor arena. Then, we moved the horse jumping equipment to the side and jumped a snowmobile off a ramp in front of the same green screen. Rick Garrison, who also has several film credits as a stuntman, performed the snow mobile jumps on the dirt arena floor. Finally, the additional snowmobile footage was all shot on the mountains after a big snow and The Bear Lodge Resortprovided guiding services and the trick riders to perform the snowmobile maneuvers.

Once all the footage was taken, we began the process of assembling the final product. We took the three distinctly different landscapes and digitally created the world that you see in the finished product. After many, many hours of painstaking image correction and enhancement, compositing the different segments into one master setting (a sweeping vista of the Big Horns taken from atop a 200 foot cliff), and using our computer software to morph the riders and horses into snowmobiles, the final product came into being. The commercial was recently showcased in the Board of Tourism’s presentation to the Sheridan Area Chamber of Commerce and is now showing in several states. We are currently in development for two new commercials for the city.